Developed by US National Library of Medicine (NLM) this life sciences and biomedicine database uses specialist Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to index highly reputed medical journals.

Ability to map to MeSH search terms and to build up your search strategy with inbuilt Boolean operators.

A range of ways to refine and limit search results based on types of studies, cohort study groups and more.

MeSH topics and sub-topics provide a range of ways to focus in on very specific medical areas of research.

University Library

Search OneSearch for the Medline Database

Both Medline and Pubmed are produced by the US National Library of Medicine.

• Medline (1960) represents a more highly selected range of medical journals which have been catalogued using MeSH – Medical subject headings.

• PubMed (1996) contains all of Medline catalogued records plus articles from Journals considered out of scope for Medline and some full-text OA journals.

Beginning your Search in Medline

Medline is one of many databases delivered through the Ovid Platform

As you build your search concepts they appear in this area above your search box.

To map your search terms to MeSH subject headings you need to be in “Advanced Search” and have this tick box selected.

These are the terms that map to “Gender Selection”

The “Scope” information tells us

more about the uses of each MeSH term

The “subject heading” link shows us where this term sits in

a subject classification tree

Working with subheadings

Choosing the one subject heading will give you access to a number of sub-headings you can choose from or omit.

For instance, we can see 197 articles specifically relate to the Ethics of sex preselection.

The first completed search is added to our search history

We can begin to search for our second core concept.

Selecting two terms – our MeSH subject term and our key word phrase does not give us this option.

As there is no matching MeSH term for “female or girl baby” we are requesting a key word search for any appearance of these terms.

Using the “search history” area to build your search string

However this combination only gives us 7 results and a review of the display of results indicate they are not very on topic – that we are not using the correct terms.

From the Ovid “Search History” you can select each of your concept search results and decide how to combine them into a search string using AND, OR

Instead we are going to try using the Advanced Limits within Ovid to focus in on the impact of

“sex preselection” on the female gender in humans.

Refining your search strategy and results

However this combination only gives us 7 results and a review of the display of results indicate they are not very on topic – that we are not using the correct terms.

This gives us 724 results and a review of results using the “display results” option identifies many of high relevance to our topic focus.

Using limits available from your search results (further down the LH pane) allows you to hone in on particular types of publications

such as systematic reviews, comparative studies and case reports.

However this combination only gives us 7 results and a review of the display of results indicate they are not very on topic – that we are not using the correct terms.

Look in detail at highly relevant results to identify other subject and keyword search terms

you could build into your search strategy.

An abstract will tell you a lot about the report or case study and help you decide if it is a good focus for your Scientific review assessment.

Honing in on good leads and modifying your search strategy