Skip to Main Content
Ask A Librarian

Honors Nursing: Ovid version of PubMed

MEDLINE and MeSH

        MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine® (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains more than 26 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®). MEDLINE is the online counterpart to MEDLARS® (MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) that originated in 1964.     

The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine and used for indexing, cataloging, and searching for biomedical and health-related information and documents.  MeSH includes the subject descriptors appearing in MEDLINE®/PubMed®and other NLM databases. MeSH provides a consistent way for content with different terminology but the same concepts. MeSH organizes its descriptors in a hierarchical structure so that broad searches will find articles indexed more narrowly. This structure also provides an effective way for searchers to browse MeSH in order to find appropriate descriptors.  The MeSH vocabulary is continually updated by subject specialists in various areas. Each year hundreds of new concepts are added, and thousands of modifications are made.

MEDLINE (Ovid)

1.  Basic Search

Enter a search with the following steps:

  1. Enter your topic or question in ordinary English.
  2. OPTIONAL: Apply the database limit(s).
  3. Click the Search button.

Ovid will post results to your Search History.

2.  Advanced Search:  Keyword Searching

Use the Advanced Search option to search commonly-used fields, combine search terms or search statements using Boolean operators and/or to use Ovid command-line syntax. The default search field is Keyword (.mp).

To do a Keyword search, choose your key words and use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) between them, as in h1n1 and (oseltamivir or tamiflu). Note that if you type a string of words without operators, Ovid looks for an exact match for the whole string.

By default, Ovid looks for your keywords in the default multi-purpose (.mp) set of fields. The set varies by database but usually includes Title, Original Title, Abstract, and Subject Heading. The fields that have been searched display in the Search History.

To execute a search:

  1. Select a search type. In this example, Keyword is used.
  2. Type a term or phrase, depending on the selected search type; for details, see the following sections.
  3. Click the Search button.

Ovid will post the results to your search history.