Using PubMed to Find Human-Related Studies

This brief tutorial for expert users of PubMed explains how to search for studies indexed as being related to humans, how to separately search non-indexed records, and how to combine these two searches into one string.
For more educational materials on PubMed, see PubMed Online Training at www.nlm.nih.gov/oet/ed/pubmed/
Transcript:
(music)
This tutorial is intended for expert PubMed searchers.
Please consult with your librarian for assistance with this and other expert search techniques.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to limit a search to human-related studies.
There are two main strategies for searching comprehensively
for human-related studies in PubMed:
1-Search indexed and non-indexed records separately;
or 2-Combine the above searches for
indexed and non-indexed records using the double NOT strategy.
Let’s explore both options.
Indexers add the MeSH term "humans" and other species terms during the indexing process.
Only MEDLINE citations, however, will have those terms.
One way to retrieve research on humans is to add AND (humans [mh]) to your search terms.
This has the same effect as using the humans filter on the sidebar of your PubMed results.
Using this method, PubMed is only going to look in the MeSH field of a record.
Relying only on the MeSH term “humans” may exclude applicable records, including non-MEDLINE records and MEDLINE citations that have yet to be indexed.
To find non-indexed records for articles about humans, conduct a second search.
Combine your search strategy with NOT medline[sb].
This retrieves all non-indexed records matching your search terms.
Non-indexed records will require your review.
So from these results, manually select relevant studies.
Another option for finding only human-related studies is to combine the searches for indexed and non-indexed records using the “double NOT strategy.”
This involves, first, collecting all of the records that are about animals, but not about humans,
and then excluding that entire set from your search.
You can add this to an existing search strategy.
To save this strategy to add to future searches, you can search:
all[sb] NOT (animals [MeSH Terms] NOT humans [MeSH Terms])
You can then combine the saved search with a future search.
As an example, go to the Advanced Search Builder.
Enter your search string.
Then, combine with the ‘double NOT’ search using its search number with “AND.”
Then click Search to review your results.
The search results will exclude animal studies that do not include humans.
The remaining results will only show human-related studies, plus all non-indexed records that contain your search terms.
Again, you will need to manually review the non-indexed records for relevant studies on your topic.