We’ve all been there: you remember one perfect paper—maybe your supervisor mentioned it, you cited it years ago, or you saw it in a lecture slide—but now it has vanished into the endless sea of search results. You type a…
PubMed is powerful, but it can also be surprisingly strict. Two of the most common reasons a search returns either too many results or misses key papers are (1) not using truncation when you should, and (2) using quotation marks…
![PubMed Field Tags Explained: Why [tiab] Title/Abstract Searching Beats “All Fields” + How to Use [au] and [tw]](https://hvalabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/thumbnail-695fe93575fb2-768x576.jpg)
Most PubMed searches start with a simple keyword in the basic search box—and many stop there. But if you’ve ever felt like PubMed returns thousands of results that are only loosely related to what you need, the issue often isn’t…
Ever run a PubMed search and feel like you’re drowning in results that are “about” your topic—but not about the specific angle you need? If you’re looking for articles on the therapy of a disease, or the adverse effects of…
PubMed can feel like a firehose: you type a solid clinical or research question, hit search, and suddenly you’re staring at thousands of citations—many relevant, many not. Two advanced MeSH techniques can change that fast: using the PubMed explode feature…
Searching PubMed effectively often comes down to one skill: using the right Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Keywords alone can miss relevant articles (or retrieve too many irrelevant ones), especially when authors use different terminology for the same concept. This step-by-step…
Searching PubMed can feel deceptively simple: type a phrase, hit search, and scan the results. But medical researchers quickly discover a frustrating reality—two people can search the same topic and get very different results. The reason often comes down to…
PubMed can feel deceptively simple: you type a few words, hit search, and hope the “right” studies appear. But the difference between an overwhelming list of irrelevant citations and a precise set of high-value articles often comes down to Boolean…
Type “heart attack” into PubMed and you’ll often get excellent results—even if the most precise medical term is “myocardial infarction”. That’s not luck. It’s PubMed’s Automatic Term Mapping (ATM), a behind-the-scenes feature that expands everyday language into professional terminology so…