"MeSH", an acronym for "Medical Subject Headings", represents a uniform roster of terms deployed to index and search articles in the biomedical sphere. These terms are meticulously chosen by human indexers who scrutinize each article and cherry-pick the most fitting MeSH terms based on the content. However, there are occasions, particularly in the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) field, where several TCM specific terms do not have corresponding MeSH terms. In such situations, employing tags can aid in refining your search and ensuring precision.
The [ti] and [tiab] tags serve as pivotal tools to streamline your PubMed search within distinct segments of the articles:
[ti]: This tag is used to search only within the titles of articles. If you use the search term "acupuncture[ti]", you'll get articles where "acupuncture" appears in the title.
[tiab]: This tag searches within the titles and abstracts of articles. Using "acupuncture[tiab]" will retrieve articles where "acupuncture" is found in either the title or the abstract.
Here's a step-by-step example of how you might use these tags in a PubMed search related to "Acupuncture and meridian":
First, you might simply type the terms into the search box:
acupuncture meridian
This will retrieve a broad set of results where both terms appear anywhere in the articles.
To increase specificity and consider synonyms, you could use operators and nesting:
acupuncture (meridian OR channel)
This will retrieve articles that contain "acupuncture" and either "meridian" or "channel".
If you know the MeSH term for a topic, it's often better to use it. MeSH terms are more precise than free text:
acupuncture[mesh] (meridian OR channel)
This will retrieve articles indexed under the MeSH term "acupuncture" and contain either "meridian" or "channel".
But suppose there's no MeSH term for "meridian" or "channel" and you want to be more specific about the channel theory:
acupuncture[mesh] (meridian[ti] OR channel[ti])
This will retrieve articles indexed under "acupuncture" and have either "meridian" or "channel" in their titles.
If you want to increase the sensitivity of your search:
acupuncture[mesh] (meridian[tiab] OR channel[tiab])
This will retrieve articles indexed under "acupuncture" and have either "meridian" or "channel" in their titles or abstracts. This approach will yield a wider range of articles that mention these terms.
By manipulating your search terms in this way, you can control the scope and specificity of your search results. This can be a powerful tool for researchers looking for particular types of articles in the PubMed database.
Quiz: Acupuncture and de-qi
consider synonyms for de-qi