About
 Introduction
 Search Concepts
 PubMed
 Ovid
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tutorial

  Tutorial
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Medline is the National Library of Medicine (NLM) biomedical database, dating from 1966, and currently indexing about 4000 journals.

Articles are indexed by trained indexers who classify using the hierarchical Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Articles may be indexed under as many MeSH terms as are judged appropriate, and additional indexing fields include author, date, journal, title and abstracts.

Different suppliers provide alternative interfaces to access the underlying Medline database. The desirable features of any interface are: -

  • combination of searches using Boolean logic
  • efficient mapping of search terms to MeSH
  • ability to save your searches
  • ability to apply useful limits
  • control of citation output

The recommendation of this tutorial is to use the BMA MedlinePlus Ovid interface, or PubMed at the NLM.

Tutorial