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When I first started working as a health sciences librarian, the undergraduate nursing students had an assignment to find an article about a famous nurse. Not an article written by this nurse, but a biographical article about the nurse.

Let's imagine that our hypothetical student decided to find an article about Florence Nightingale in PubMed.

There are several possible search strategies for finding this information:

1. Florence Nightingale
2. "Florence Nightingale"
3. Nightingale F

Search #1:

PubMed translates this string into (Florence[all fields] AND Nightingale[all fields]) because of Automatic Term Mapping: this is not a MeSH term, it's not a journal title, it's not a known phrase, and it's not an author name. Hence, the [all fields] search. The results? 663 citations, many of which have little or nothing to do with the famous nurse.

Search #2:

Using the quotation marks turns off the Automatic Term Mapping in PubMed. How is this search translated? "Florence Nightingale"[All Fields]. This retrieves 652 citations, many of which have the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery listed as the author affiliation and nothing to do with the nurse.

Search #3:

Because of Automatic Term Mapping, this will be a search of the Author Field. Indeed, PubMed finds 24 citations with F Nightingale listed as the author. A quick look at these will show that 22 are translations of the writings of the famous nurse into non-English languages, one is by a contemporary author with the same first initial and last name, and one is a reprint of an excerpt from Nightingale's "Notes on Hospitals" and contains some biographical information. But, there's got to be more in PubMed about Florence Nightingale. There has to be a better way to search.

There is. Use the search field tag [ps] which is an abbreviation for personal name as subject. The search Nightingale F[ps] finds 477 citations and all of them are about Florence Nightingale.

There are many useful search field tags available in PubMed. For a complete listing, see "Search Field Qualification" in the PubMed Help document or use this link http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static/help/pmhelp.html#SearchFieldQualification

Donna Berryman, Outreach Coordinator