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Alan's Medline Access via PubMed Herewith, unrestricted access to the National Library of Medicine's wonderful 11-million-record Medline database via PubMed -- your tax dollars at good work. Micro-Tutorial: Medline is searchable by free text words, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), author or journal names, whatever. For free text searching, simply enter a series of words separated by ampersands, like this: Vitamin A & lung cancer & smoking To get closer to the mark, insert the [mh] tag after your search term, which will return citations to which are attached that term as a MeSH heading (Medical Subject Heading). If the term occurs as a MeSH heading, rather than just occuring somewhere in the text of the item, that means that it was thought by human indexers to be used in a significant way in that item. So, to get more specific, try this: Vitamin A[mh] & lung cancer[mh] & smoking[mh] The standard boolean operators can be used. Use "&" for a boolean "and", use "OR" or "|" for boolean "or"; use "NOT" for boolean "not"; use "(...)" for grouping; like this: ( Vitamin A[mh] & lung cancer[mh] ) NOT smoking[mh] The full set of Medline Qualifiers is available (look to your right). If you use one of these qualifiers, you can dispense with the "[mh]" business, since the Qualifiers automatically limit you to MeSH hits: Vitamin A/TU & lung cancer[mh] & smoking[mh] In that case, you will get all the info on the clinical use of vitamin as as a chemopreventive agent, plus dose information, plus side effects if any, and so forth. The "TU" qualifier is extremely useful for research on substances; with it you will get therapeutic uses and applications, plus contraindications and other practical info. Detailed help text is available if you're really having a hard time. Best approach: start failing and go from there. Play with it. Take a ride on Medline!
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Medline Fields (most commonly-used) Affiliation: [AD],[AFFL] All Fields: [ALL] Author: [AU],[AUTH] TextWords: [TW],[WORD] TitleWords: [TI],[TITL] Journal: [TA],[JOUR] MeSH Major: [MAJR] Medline Qualifiers Pubmed accepts the standard Medline qualifiers listed below. Pubmed will automatically "explode" each major qualifier (listed in boldface) to include all the secondary qualifiers below it. Hence the search statement vitamin E/TU will include not only TU itself, but also AD, AE, CT and PO. You can override this by attaching [mh:noexp] to a search clause, like this: vitamin E/TU[mh:noexp] which will yield TU citations only. TU: Therapeutic Use AD: Admin/Dosage AE: Adverse Effects CT: Contraindications PO: Poisoning CH: Chemistry AG: Agonists AA: Analogs & Derivs AI: Antag/Inhibitors CS: Chemical Synth PD: Pharmacology AD: Admin/Dosage AE: Adverse Effects AG: Agonists AI: Antag/Inhibitors CT: Contraindications DU: Diagnostic Use PK: Pharmacokinetics PH: Physiology GE: Genetics GD: Growth/Develop IM: Immunology ME: Metabolism PP: Physiopathology SE: Secretion ET: Etiology CI: Chem-Induced CO: Complications CN: Congenital EM: Embryology GE: Genetics IM: Immunology MI: Microbiology PS: Parasitology TR: Transmission TH: Therapy DH: Diet Therapy DT: Drug Therapy NU: Nursing PC: Prevention/Cntrl RT: Radiotherapy RH: Rehabilitation SU: Surgery AN: Analysis BL: Blood CF: Cerebrspnl Fluid IP: Isolation/Purif UR: Urine | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||