Medical Information on the Internet
Module 3: PubMed and NLM Gateway
Terminology
- Abstract
- A short summary of the content of a journal article. An abstract is NOT the full text of the article.
- Boolean Logic
- Using the terms AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR to limit or expand the results of your search.
- Citation
- A brief listing of the important information that will help you to locate the fulltext of a book or journal article. A citation is NOT the full text. It usually consists of the author and title of the article, the name of the journal, the year it was published, the pages on which the article appeared, and sometimes, an abstract.
- Indexing
- The art and science of assigning subject headings to a particular article (or book) in order to assist in its retrieval.
- Journal
- A publication that comes out on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) that is only available via subscription, and is concerned with the dissemination of professional information (no matter what the profession).
- MeSH
- Medical Subject Headings—the complicated indexing thesaurus devised by the National Library of Medicine to make searching more uniform.
- Textword Searching
- A search of all the words contained in the citation, including the title, abstract, MeSH terms, and author affiliation.
- Truncation
- Entering the root of a word, and using a symbol (often *) to search for all possible endings for the word.
