The Yale MeSH Analyzer is described by USA in this article.
With the rise in the number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses in the health sciences literature, the need for complex searches to identify articles remains relevant and in demand. These types of searches can be quite time consuming, and tools to help streamline or simplify the process are definitely needed. For example, let’s say you are conducting a systematic review and are in the midst of performing a comprehensive literature search. You have compiled a list of articles on your topic and have played around with your searches enough to have a good idea of what’s out there. However, no matter what you do, a few articles slip through the cracks of your best-constructed search strings. You know the articles exist because you’ve managed to identify them through skill or luck, but they just do not show up in your PubMed searches. Why is that?
There is a new tool that can help with this very issue, called the Yale MeSH Analyzer (http://mesh.med.yale.edu/). Created by Yale University librarians Holly Grossetta Nardini and Lei Wang, the Yale MeSH Analyzer assists in identifying why some articles are missing in search results. It can also help identify additional MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms or phrases in titles and abstracts, as well as author assigned keywords. The Yale MeSH Analyzer does this by collecting the necessary metadata to analyze searches, and then creates a grid to visually explain the information to users.
To start, you would enter the PMID number of each article you want to analyze. PMIDs are the unique identifying number assigned to each article record when it enters the PubMed system, and is found at the end of a PubMed citation. You can enter up to 20 PMIDs in the text box, and once you select “Go”, the Yale MeSH Analyzer will retrieve the article(s) metadata from PubMed and present the results in either a HTML or Excel grid format.
A short online tutorial that will walk you through the process is available at library.medicine.yale.edu/tutorials/1559.
From Clista Clanton
BioFeedback Newsletter
http://biomedicallibrary.southalabama.edu/library/?q=bf-110YaleMESH
