Selected MEDLINE Search Terms

The information professionals at the Health Sciences and Human Services Library have compiled this selected listing of terms that can be used when using PubMed to search MELDINE for articles on parish nursing. These include free-text terms and MeSH terms.

MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings, and is the National Library of Medicine's vocabulary of biomedical terms which are used to index articles in MEDLINE. Each article in the MEDLINE database is assigned a series of MeSH terms that represent the content of the article. For more information on using MeSH terms, read NLM's MeSH Fact Sheet, or view the PubMed Tutorial.

Searches can be conducted using words that are not part of the MeSH vocabulary. This is known as free-text searching or unqualified searching. In free-text searching, PubMed will retrieve articles that contain these words in the title, author, abstract, or other places in the record. It is sometimes helpful to enter phrases in double-quotes (such as "parish nursing") to ensure that the terms are searched as a phrase. Remember that some terms can also be made plural. For more information on free-text searching, read the How It Works portion of the PubMed Tutorial.

Click here to link directly to PubMed, the National Library of Medicine's free MEDLINE interface. Use PubMed's MeSH Browser to find additional MeSH terms to use in constructing your search strategy.

Search Terms