Refining Your Search

There are a couple of easy ways to refine your search that will quickly reduce or expand the number of articles you find:

• You can select articles from within your search according to type (e.g. clinical trial, review, meta-analysis). A search for ‘hemophilia’ nets 27,197 articles. Select ‘clinical trial’ to reduce this figure to 783, or ‘review’ to get 3,911
• If you have trouble finding more than a few articles that appear to be relevant to your research, you can check your search strategy by comparing the MeSH headings you use with those under which a relevant article has been indexed. For example, the paper ‘Sedentary Time and Screen-Based Sedentary Behaviors of Children With a Chronic Disease’ is indexed with these terms, some of which you might not have thought of:

    Accelerometry

Adolescent

Child

Chronic Disease*

Computers

Female

Health Behavior*

Humans

Male

Motor Activity*

Sedentary Lifestyle*

Surveys and Questionnaires

Television

Time Factors

Video Games

If this was the kind of article you were looking for, you can click on a link provided by PubMed to generate a new list of ‘related articles’. These are articles that are indexed in a similar way to the one you like, starting with those that are most similar.