Subheadings and explosions

In the Ovid Medline interface, subheadings are not autoexploded. You have to select subheadings from a list of checkboxes. Importantly, it looks like checkboxes are only provided for the subheadings associated with the MeSH term you're looking at - NOT for its narrower terms.

So, let's say that you're searching for statistics about corneal diseases. There exists a MeSH term Corneal Diseases, with narrower terms of course. You explode and go through to the subheadings page, and select epidemiology, ethnology, and mortality. You notice that "statistics and numerical data" is not available in the list.

You are, however, skeptical, so you try typing in exp Corneal Diseases/sn. Lo and behold, some results! A quick NOT shows that some of these were not found with the ep,eh,mo search.

Complete Reference view shows that the articles in this list are all narrower terms of Corneal Diseases, with subheading sn, such as Keratoconjunctivitis/sn.

So, if your search term has narrower terms and doesn't have a checkbox for a particular subheading, it's worth typing in the combination to see if any results from narrower terms are found.

Another example:

Searched Smoking and found three relevant subheadings: dt,pc,th

Searched "Tobacco Use" which is a broader term of Smoking. Only 2 subheadings found: pc,th

This meant that Smoking/dt returned 130 articles not found by the Tobacco Use search.

I was able to search exp "Tobacco Use"/dt,pc,th and retrieve the additional articles.

It may be helpful to search all subheadings related to your topic even if they are not listed.