Writing strategies for improving the access of medical literature

Table 1 Disadvantages of Medical Subject Headings

Disadvantages of MeSH
1 MeSH terms are manually assigned to articles after an article is made available on PubMed. Manually assigned MeSH terms are not available for recently published articles. This is a time-consuming process, and hence, these articles fail to appear in search results when only MeSH terms are used for searching
2 In a scenario where no appropriate MeSH term is found while searching for a concept, it becomes important to search for relevant words in the title and abstract as well
3 Mesh search allows us to restrict our PubMed search to only find articles where the MeSH term is the main topic. In this way, articles in which the term and any selected subheadings are indexed as a major topic are displayed. For example, searching for "mechanical ventilation"[Majr] will exclude articles where this topic is covered to a lesser extent from the search results
4 Since PubMed only contains abstracts of articles, not full texts, searching the entire article for words is not possible with the use of MeSH
5 Sometimes, PubMed might fail to automatically match the exact MeSH term with the search
6 Additionally, some readers might not be comfortable using Boolean operators and logic. Boolean operators are not recognized by all databases, and the availability of all operators in a database might also be questionable
7 Moreover, databases also differ in their way of using syntax to enter a Boolean operator. For example, in Scopus, “NOT” is entered as “AND NOT.”
8 Certain databases or search systems do not affect search results based on whether the terms are entered in uppercase or lowercase, but some engines like Google Scholar may require capitalized Boolean operators for proper functioning

MeSH: Medical Subject Headings.