Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Searching Steroids in Medline

Here's a real pain in the wazoo.

You search in the MeSH database and get the MeSH Steroids. So far, so good. But you get only a few articles on the topic and you have a sneaking suspicion that there should be more.

So, you try some other combinations of MeSH, or some keywords, and lo and behold, there is another MeSH term, Adrenal Cortex Hormones! It's in a completely different part of the tree than Steroids.

Grr. It particularly burns me that articles with the word Steroid in the title are indexed Adrenal Cortex Hormones rather than Steroids. If you're gonna be like that, why not use both?

The same thing happens with corticosteroids and glucocorticoids, which are narrower terms of each, so y'know, be warned.

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