Public Health Information Partners

Public Health Information Partners Information Sleuthing II: Finding and Managing the Literature

Exercise 2: Scavenging PubMed

1) Use the MeSH Browswer to search the following MeSH terms and construct a search using the Boolean AND:

 Obesity (apply the subheading “prevention and control”)  School Health Services  Evaluation Studies

a. How many records do you retrieve with this search?

b. Give the citation for what appears to be a “good” article.

2) How do the results from question #1 compare with the following search – not using the MeSH browser (type in exactly as follows):

obesity prevention AND school* AND programs

Name three ways these results differ from #1 and offer a reason why.

The Public Health Information Partners (PHIP) project is funded by the National Library of Medicine under NLM contract N01-LM-1-3521 with the National Networks of Library of Medicine, Middle Atlantic Region, Region 1. 3) You need to find articles by an author named Mary Ann Chiasson. How many can you retrieve in PubMed? How did you search?

4) A colleague mentions an article that interests you. He says, “It was either in the American Journal of Public Health or the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in the last couple years, and it talked about reasons why WIC participants don’t collect their checks.” He doesn’t remember the authors or anything more. You want this article. How do you find it?

5) What is the title of the article beginning on page 242 of the September-October 2005 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior?

6) You need to get articles about the by-products produced by drinking water purification using chlorine. Given what you now know, what might be an ideal search strategy in PubMed? Hint: Provide MeSH headings and/or keywords connected by Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT).

The Public Health Information Partners (PHIP) project is funded by the National Library of Medicine under NLM contract N01-LM-1-3521 with the National Networks of Library of Medicine, Middle Atlantic Region, Region 1.