MEDLINE
Search Strategies: Obesity
These recommendations
are based on the PubMed interface
to MEDLINE.
In mid-2004, a
search for "obesity" in the PubMed search box turned up nearly three-quarters
of a million citations, so some care must be taken in formulating
focused search strategies. This is best accomplished by using takng
advantage
of
MEDLINE's indexing by Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and related
subheadings.
If you begin your
search by clicking on the link to the MeSH
database on the left-hand side of the PubMed opening screen and
type obesity into the search box, you will find 5 MeSH entries
related to the word "obesity." One of these is the
MeSH "obesity." Clicking on this link, you will see this
page, where you can begin constructing an obesity search that
is limited to specific subheadings. In addition, you can restrict
your search to those papers in which obesity (or obesity
resticted to specific subheadings) was the major topic of the article.
Here is an example
of a search that is limited to obesity/prevention
and control as a major topic.
Combining
Obesity with other MeSH
You can create
very specific searches by combining MeSH. For example, after sending
"obesity" to the search box, you can type in the word "mortality,"
which you see is also MeSH, and send it too to the search box. This
will create the following search strategy: "Obesity"[MeSH]
AND "Mortality"[MeSH], the results of which can be seen
by following this
link. These results (more than 500 citations) might be further
limited by language or by journal subset. Other MeSH -- such as "diabetes
mellitus" or "hypertension" or "hypercholesterolemia" -- might have
been employed insted of "mortality."
Body
Mass Index
It is always a
good idea to employ mulitple strategies when searching in PubMed/MEDLINE.
Looking at the indexing of some of the results from the above search
("Obesity"[MeSH] AND "Mortality"[MeSH]), it became
clear that the MeSH "Body Mass Index" was used to index many relevant
papers. A search based on the strategy "Body Mass Index"[MeSH] AND
"Mortality"[MeSH] produces this
result.
Upstream
Causes of Obesity
The MEDLINE indexing
for French
et al, Annu Rev Public Health is as follows:
MH - Adult
MH - Advertising
MH - Child
MH - *Exercise
MH - *Food Habits
MH - Food Supply
MH - Health Planning
MH - Human
MH - Leisure Activities
MH - *Life Style
MH - Obesity/epidemiology/*prevention & control
MH - *Social Environment
MH - United States/epidemiology
Systematic
Reviews
Systematic reviews
can be located by using a filter in PubMed. To to this, find click
on the "Clinical Queries" button on the left hand side of
the PubMed screen, which will take you to the PubMed
Clinical Queries screen. Toward the bottom of this screen, you
will find the "systematic reviews" check button and entry
box. To create the pre-formulated search that you see on the "What
can be done?" page, I first formulated my search strategy in
the MeSH browser and then cut and pasted it into this search box.
Here's what got pasted into the systematic reviews box:
"obesity/prevention
and control"[MAJR]
After finding
the results, I clicked on the "Details" link toward the
right side of the screen, beneath the search box. The link to the
url for this search was then pasted into the Web page...it will conduct
a new search based on this strategy whenever
anyone clicks on it.
