Thursday, July 27, 2017

No subheadings for MeSH terms recently promoted from Supplementary Concept

If you come across a MeSH term which was recently promoted from being a supplementary concept to a proper MeSH, you may have to modify your search.

For instance, the drug Adalimumab shows Year Introduced: 2016 (2002). This means that it became a MeSH term in 2016, but was available as a supplementary concept since 2002.

I was feeling pretty good about this because 2002 was some time ago. My first search went:

("Adalimumab/adverse effects"[Mesh] OR "Adalimumab/toxicity"[Mesh]) AND ("Lung/drug effects"[Mesh] OR "Lung Diseases/epidemiology"[Mesh] OR "Lung Diseases/etiology"[Mesh])
There were 11 results (9 in English).

Pretty textbook, right? Yawn. What I didn't notice was that all of the results were from 2015+, which should have been a big hint.

Anyway, then I did the EMBASE search, and holey crowley. Tons and tons of highly relevant results, that should have been found by Medline.

Which is when I realised that all those articles indexed between 2002 and 2015 would have been indexed "adalimumab"[Supplementary concept] _with no subheadings_. Because supplementary concepts don't get subheadings! So when the term was promoted, they were changed to "Adalimumab"[Mesh], also without subheadings.

"Adalimumab"[Mesh] AND ("Lung/drug effects"[Mesh] OR "Lung Diseases/epidemiology"[Mesh] OR "Lung Diseases/etiology"[Mesh])
There were 107 results (99 in English).

So, watch out for those promoted terms. They're tricksy!

No comments:

Post a Comment