Subject Guides: FSN 584: Lipids, Diet and Cardiovascular Disease: PubMed MeSH

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"MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the NLM controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for PubMed"
from: Home - MeSH - NCBI [emphasis added].

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Analyze your topic & separate the concepts: What is the effect of niacin on cholesterol? → niacin, cholesterol
List synonyms & related terms for each concept: niacin → niacin, vitamin b3, etc.
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- PubMed automatically "explodes" individual MeSH terms
- PubMed automatically adds selected keyword searches of your entered term
- Use subheadings to find a few, very targeted results
Combine related terms in the Search Builder box using OR

Booleans: ANDs & ORs

Use AND for more specific results
niacin AND cholesterol

AND narrows a search, finding only results containing both terms.

Use OR to broaden a search with related terms
niacin OR vitamin B3

OR expands a search, finding results containing either or both terms.

Image credit: "Logic Gates.svg" by HereToHelp, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, is available via Wikimedia Commons. Nancy R. Curtis cropped images from original graphic, and modified colors to accommodate color vision disabilities.