Thursday, November 6, 2014

Search Hint: Searching for Ebola in MEDLINE/PubMed

From the November 5th NLM Technical Bulletin, a search tip on ebola searches in PubMed:

The simple PubMed search of:
ebola*
retrieves all citations indexed with any of the Ebola MeSH headings as well as citations that have not yet been indexed but have that root string as a text word. Please be aware that truncation turns off Automatic Term Mapping and explosions in PubMed; however, with this search none of the Ebola MeSH headings have narrower terms at this time in their MeSH hierarchy, so nothing is lost by truncation.
The MeSH Vocabulary places the Ebola virus (MeSH: Ebolavirus) in the Organisms tree and the infection (MeSH: Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola) in the Diseases tree. Indexing policy dictates that indexers coordinate the infection and virus when appropriate. In addition, searchers may be interested in the MeSH term Ebola Vaccines in the Chemicals and Drugs tree to find the literature on that specific topic.
Please also visit the NLM Information Resources for the 2014 Ebola Outbreak page.