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Information Skills: Searching

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Subject thesauri

A subject thesaurus is a collection of predefined terms that describe a discipline such as medicine.  These terms are applied by expert human indexers with the aim of describing the contents of any journal article, or other publication such as a conference paper.  The thesaurus ensures uniformity and consistency of indexing.  If you know a thesaural term that describes the topic you want to find, searching for that term in the thesaural or subject field finds all the indexed articles in the database on that topic.  The thesaurus most often used in medicine is the Medical Subject Headings or MeSH.  MeSH is used in MEDLINE and is the basis for CINAHL thesaurus.

Guide to using a subject thesaurus

Guide in Microsoft Word.  Click to download.

Using the CINAHL/MeSH subject headings feature in EBSCO - Tutorial - YouTube

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Advanced Searcing on CINAHL from EBSCO - Tutorial - YouTube

YouTube may be blocked on some NHS computers.

Using the CINAHL/MeSH subject headings feature in EBSCO - Tutorial - vimeo