Ted,
PubMed is a database of article citations, which is why you got such a large retrieval set. You can however, do the search Mental Disorders Diagnosed in Childhood in the NLM Catalog, the Entrez interface to the NLM bibliographic records, and retrieve 7134 items, because Entrez automatically "explodes" a MeSH term and searches all the narrower terms in a tree unless you explicitly instruct the system not to do that.
LocatorPlus and the NLM Catalog provide access to the same bibliographic data, but the NLM Catalog was specifically created because the Voyager ILS could not take advantage of the MeSH tree structures in subject searching. The NLM Catalog is available at www.nlmcatalog.nlm.nih.gov
Diane Boehr
Head of Cataloging, NLM
boehrd_at_mail.nlm.nih.gov
-------------- Original message --------------
From: Ted P Gemberling <tgemberl_at_UAB.EDU>
> > Child Development Disorders, Pervasive is in turn a NT of Mental
> Disorders Diagnosed in Childhood, which is a NT of Mental Disorders.
> Now, the MeSH scope note for Mental Disorders Diagnosed in Childhood
> says: "used for searching: indexers and catalogers apply specifics."
> This apparently means that as a cataloger or indexer of individual
> articles, you do not use this heading. Interestingly, when I tried a
> search for this term in PubMed, another of NLM's databases, I retrieved
> articles with narrower terms. So PubMed has some mechanism for
> retrieving items with narrower terms when you search for this broad one.
> If you search for this in NLM's regular "catalog," LocatorPlus, you get
> nothing, since it's not a term placed on records. I'm not sure how
> helpful it is in this case, because you get 103,000 hits in PubMed. But
> PubMed also gives you access to the MeSH Database, which shows you the
> hierarchical relations between subjects.
>
>
Received on Mon Jun 11 2007 - 20:55:16 EDT