When you do a subject search in MEDLINE, you select and make decisions about MeSH. When the system begins the search, it attempts to match the concept or term that you've selected to the MeSH that are assigned to the subject field of each article.
MeSH EXAMPLE
If you are looking for information on heart attacks, one author may use the text word "heart attack," another may use the text word "myocardial infarct," while another may simply refer to an "infarct." In text word searching, you would have to enter all three terms to retrieve all of the relevant articles. But with MeSH searching, all of the relevant articles will be indexed under the term "myocardial infarction," the official Medical Subject Heading for this concept.
Advantages:
- All citations on a particular subject are described by the same MeSH, so that the searcher does not have to think of all synonyms/ variations of a term and perform multiple searches.
- MeSH searches allow the searcher to 'focus' a subject heading in order to find fewer, more relevant citations on the subject, or to 'explode' a subject heading in order to find a larger, broader set of citations.
Let's review the differences between text word and MeSH searching.
