Medline may be accessed 2 ways

1. Medline (EBSCO) - through the library database subscriptions

2.  PubMed  - accessed through the US government's free site

What's the difference between Medline and PubMed?  From a biology students viewpoint  -- there is no real difference to use one over the other, (other than the interfaces).  But check out the link above if you want the details.

MeSH - Medical Subject Headings - Use to narrow or broaden your topic

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. Each journal article is associated with a set of MeSH terms that are assigned to describe the content of an article. MeSH terms are arranged in a hierarchy, or "tree structure," that permits searching at various levels of detail, from the most general to more narrow levels to find the most precise terms.

To Browse and Search with MeSH Terms :

To browse a list of subject headings available in the database, click the MeSH button on the green sub-toolbar of Medline. A new thesaurus-specific Browse Screen is displayed.

Enter search terms in the Browse for field. Select either the Term Begins With, Term Contains or Relevancy Ranked radio button and click Browse. A list of headings is displayed. As you select headings, mark Explode or Major Concept.

To display a list of results that match your search terms, click Search Database.

• Term Begins With – Enter a term in the Browse for field and choose Term Begins With.  An alphabetical list is displayed.

Term Contains – Enter a term in the Browse for field and choose Term Contains.  The search term appears first, followed by terms that contain the word in alphabetical order

Limiters

You may limit your searches to  clinical trials, review articles, age group , humans animals. 

Last Update - 02/08/2008