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MIMM 301 Scientific Writing Skills

Land Acknowledgement

McGill University is located in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) on unceded Kanien'kehá:ka traditional territory.

Research basics

Take a look at the Health Sciences Research Basics guide to learn how to define your research question, create an effective search and manage your citations.

What is PubMed?

PubMed is a free bibliographic database that comprises more that 20 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.  It is produced and maintained by the US National Library of Medicine (the world's largest medical library).

Access PubMed via the McGill Library in order for the McGill Find Full Text buttons to appear.  More information on access resources off campus is available here.    

Searching with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Medical Subject Headings (or MeSH) is a controlled vocabulary used to index articles in PubMed.  Using MeSH to develop your search means you do not need to worry about synonyms and spelling variations and will increase the relevancy of your results.

Below is a short video (~4mins) demonstrating how to do a search in PubMed using MeSH. 

National Library of Medicine, (2023, December 23). PubMed Subject Search: How it Works [Video file].  Retrieved from https://youtu.be/6PhCRjQDfeI?si=8ZVpdlIOnsI1y0kZ. 

Searching with Keywords

It's important to compliment your MeSH search with keywords for the following reasons:

  • not all concepts have an appropriate MeSH term 
  • not all articles have been indexed using MeSH

When brainstorming keywords, it's important to consider variant spellings, synonyms, and plural forms.

Below is a short video (~7mins) showing you how to search PubMed using keywords.  

National Library of Medicine. (2020, July 27). PubMed: Using the advanced search builder [Video file].  Retrieved from https://youtu.be/IHhTDqiNQK8.

Forward and backward citation searching

Citation searching is a good way to track progression in research.  It involves looking backward in time, at the articles that came before your focus article, as well as looking forward in time at what has been published since your focus article was published.    

Backward Citation Searching gives you insight into the resources that informed the author(s) of your focus article. 

  • Look at the works cited, or list of references at the end of your article

Forward Citation Searching allows you to see 

Searching PubMed Worksheet

Librarian

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Andrea Miller-Nesbitt
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Schulich Library of Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Engineering (Office located in the McLennan Library Building during the Schulich closure)
514-398-1663
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