Antibiotics

When searching for Antibiotics in Medline, the correct MeSH is:

Antibiotic Prophylaxis

not

Anti-infective Agents/therapeutic use

(Apparently).

Cone Rod Dystrophies, or a rare epic failure of MeSH

If you search Cone Rod Dystrophy in MeSH, you'll find that it is an entry term for Retinitis Pigmentosa, and (at least in the PubMed Mesh database), it maps only to that one term. I stupidly assumed that this meant it was the same thing. (Bad librarian, no cookie!)

My search was: "Retinitis Pigmentosa/therapy"[Majr]

Luckily, one of the articles on the topic set me straight. The abstract clearly stated that cone rod dystrophy was different from retinitis pigmentosa. I immediately stopped collecting articles on RP, and investigated.

It turns out that some people consider cone rod dystrophy to be a sub-type of retinitis pigmentosa. The more prevalent form of RP is rod cone dystrophy, where the rods are affected before the cones, resulting in night blindness. In Cone Rod Dystrophy, the cones are affected before the rods, resulting in a loss of central vision and sometimes in colour blindness. The causes of Cone Rod Dystrophy are mostly genetic, unlike with standard RP.

Armed with this new data, my new search was: ("cone rod dystrophy"[all fields] OR "cone rod dystrophies"[all fields] OR "cone rod degeneration"[all fields]) AND "Retinitis Pigmentosa/therapy"[Mesh]

However, I noticed that combining with the RP term reduced the number of articles to less than half of the results found with the keywords. It seemed odd - surely if CRD was a subtype of RP, most of the articles should have been included?

Experimental search: ("cone rod dystrophy"[all fields] OR "cone rod dystrophies"[all fields] OR "cone rod degeneration"[all fields]) NOT "Retinitis Pigmentosa/therapy"[Mesh]

Whoo-ey! It turns out that many articles about Cone Rod Dystrophy are indexed under "Retinal Diseases"[Mesh], or even more obscure terms. I noticed that the MeSH "Retinal Dystrophies" was hardly used at all, when I would have guessed that it would be the closest MeSH to Cone Rod Dystrophies. It's strange, because Cone Rod Dystrophies is so clearly an entry term for Retinitis Pigmentosa, and yet the indexers do not seem to be treating it as such.

It turned out that the best search was: "cone rod dystrophy"[all fields] OR "cone rod dystrophies"[all fields] OR "cone rod degeneration"[all fields]

I ended up going through all of the results, which was good because there was very little on therapy, and fortunately a couple of articles mentioned that fact (but of course it wasn't reflected in the indexing since the article wasn't about that). But that's a problem that had nothing to do with the indexing.

Normally MeSH terms are truly awesome, and too often taken for granted by those lucky enough to work in health librarianship. We only remember how brilliant they are when we end up searching some other subject and see how inaccurate and inconsistent the use of controlled vocabulary can truly be. However, sometimes there is a term within our own literature that shows us how messy things can be if indexing is not up to Medline's usual high standards.

Home birth

I searched home birth in the MeSH database and got no results.

I searched home birth in PubMed Reminer and found Home Childbirth.

MeSH database, can I get an "oops"?

D'as right.

Transplant or immunocompromised patients

PubMed:


"Immunocompromised Host"[Mesh] OR "Immunocompetence"[Mesh]  OR "Immunosuppression"[Mesh] OR "Immunosuppressive Agents"[Mesh] OR "Transplantation"[Mesh] OR "Transplants"[Mesh]

EMBASE:


exp immunocompromised patient/ OR exp immunocompetence/ OR exp immunosuppressive treatment/ OR exp immunosuppressive agent/ OR exp transplantation/ OR exp graft recipient/

Visual impairments

Visual impairments in PubMed:

"Vision Disorders"[Mesh] OR "Eye Diseases"[Mesh]

and, depending on your search, you may also wish to search for:

"Visual Acuity"[Mesh]

Replacement for Highlight All in Office 2010

When we first got Office 2010 at work, I quickly discovered that "Highlight All" was no longer available with Ctrl-F.

The Find option would find all of the instances of a particular word within the text, but as soon as one clicked on the text itself or attempted to make a change (say, change the text colour), all the Found words were lost. It wasn't possible to Find, and then make a change to all those instances of the found word.

Tragedy! Highlight All was supremely useful for finding important words in long bibliographies, especially where there were synonyms. For instance, if I were looking for articles related to the geriatric population, I might search for geriatric, gerontol, elder, older, oldest, senior, and so forth. I could highlight each synonym in the text, and turn each a different colour: red, orange, blue, etc... and then go through the list, finding my chosen words at a mere glance. I could take a closer look at words with other possible meanings (older, senior) when I saw their colours, and identify articles of high relevance due to the prevalence of certain colours in the title and abstract.

All this functionality disappeared when my workplace switched to Office 2010, and no one on the internet had a solution - everyone just said that it was no longer possible. I emailed Microsoft Office's support people, but they didn't have any solutions, either.

However, my colleague has just shown me how to get the same functionality with a different procedure!

1. In your document, go to Ctrl-H, or Replace in the Edit menu.
2. In the Find field, type in the word that you want to highlight, e.g. geriatric.
3. Click in the Replace With field to place your cursor there. This step is very important!
4. Click the More button
5. Under the Replace section, click on the Format button and choose Font.
6. Make any selections that you like, e.g., Font Colour: Red or Font Style: Bold.
7. Click the OK button to save your selections and go back to the "Find and Replace" dialogue box.
8. Click the Replace All button to apply your changes to the text.
9. Repeat steps 2-8 for each word that you want to highlight.
10. Click the Cancel button when you are done.

Now all of your words will be highlighted in the colours and/or styles that you chose!

Even better, this also works when composing emails in Outlook, so you can highlight words in bibliographies that you send to patrons.

I hope this streamlines your workload as much as it will mine.

(Colossal thanks to my colleague, Karen, for showing me how to do this! I've been without this functionality for a year and a half and it is brilliant to get it back again.)

PS: If you mess up and accidentally make the Find what field red and bold rather than the Replace with field, you can click on the No Formatting button to reset yourself.

Critical Care

PubMed:

"Critical Care"[Mesh] OR "Intensive Care Units"[Mesh] OR "Critical Illness"[Mesh] OR "Life Support Care"[Mesh]

If you are looking for absolutely everything, or want In Process articles, you can also add:
"critical care"[tiab] OR "intensive care"[tiab] OR "life support"[tiab] OR "close support"[tiab] OR "critically ill"[tiab] OR "critical illness"[tiab] OR icu[tiab] OR "critical unit"[tiab] OR "critical units"[tiab] OR "intensive unit"[tiab] OR "intensive units"[tiab]

EMBASE:

exp intensive care/ OR exp intensive care unit/ OR exp critical illness/ OR exp critically ill patient/

CINAHL:

MH "Critical Care+" OR MH "Critical Care Nursing+" OR MH "Critical Illness+" OR MH "Critically Ill Patients+"

Thanks to my colleague, Karen, for the suggestion of "close support"[tiab].