title: How to improve your PubMed/MEDLINE searches: 3. advanced searching, MeSH and My NCBI.
abstract: Although the basic PubMed search is often helpful, the results may sometimes be non-specific. For more control over the search process you can use the Advanced Search Builder interface. This allows a targeted search in specific fields, with the convenience of being able to select the intended search field from a list. It also provides a history of your previous searches. The search history is useful to develop a complex search query by combining several previous searches using Boolean operators. For indexing the articles in MEDLINE, the NLM uses a controlled vocabulary system called MeSH. This standardised vocabulary solves the problem of authors, researchers and librarians who may use different terms for the same concept. To be efficient in a PubMed search, you should start by identifying the most appropriate MeSH terms and use them in your search where possible. My NCBI is a personal workspace facility available through PubMed and makes it possible to customise the PubMed interface. It provides various capabilities that can enhance your search performance.
authors.affiliation: School of Advanced Technologies in Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
authors.forename: Farhad
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Fatehi
authors.forename: Leonard C
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Gray
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wootton
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D057225:Data Mining; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D016239:MEDLINE; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D039781:PubMed