Central Venous Catheters

Here's an interesting one from CINAHL:

• Central Venous Catheters
• Catheterization, Central Venous
• Catheter Care

Depending on the topic of your search, all three may be relevant, especially as there is some variation in the way they are applied.

Rural and Urban

I was doing a search for Rural Emergency Departments the other day, and came across a quirk in Ovid Medline:

If you type in:rural, it maps to the following MeSH:

• Rural Health
• Rural Population

However, if you type rural into PubMed's MeSH database or EBSCO's MeSH thesaurus (relevancy ranked), you get:

• Rural Health
• Rural Population
• Rural Health Services
• Hospitals, Rural

None of these are broader/narrower terms of each other.

BTW, if you use EBSCO's MeSH thesaurus with Term Contains instead of Relevancy Ranked, you will get only 2 MeSH:

• Rural Health Services
• Rural Population

Depending on the question, you may or may not want to use all of these, but it's good to know they exist!

Similar quirks appear in Ovid Medline when searching urban

Introduction

For several years now, I've been thinking that whenever I finish a search in Medline, it just gets filed away and no one ever looks at it again. This isn't always true, and the search strategy is recorded, but how often do I go back and look at it again?

This year I started collecting search examples for instructional purposes, but I kept thinking about recording the MeSH quirks that I came across, not only for my own use in future, but also to share with colleagues.

It's about time that I stopped thinking about it and started doing something about it.