Background
The MEDLINE view of regions is decidedly geographical. The MEDLINE controlled vocabulary, MeSH, describes Europe as, “The continent north of AFRICA, west of ASIA and east of the ATLANTIC OCEAN.”
The exploded MeSH term exp Europe/ reflects this vast geographical expanse. However, there may be occasions where a narrower definition of a region is preferred. For example, “Europe and the UK”. In this real-life example, further qualification discussions established that “Europe”, for the purposes of the investigation, was understood to be the countries making up the European Union.
This Focused Search, presented here as a search block, consists of 4 search lines, the search expressions compacted into the paragraph format for ease of viewing. Line #1 represents the countries making up the EU, individually selected from the geographical classification as rendered by MeSH. Line #2 locates countries by their English name using free term searching in the .ti,ab,hw,kf, fields for Ovid MEDLINE. Line #3 on the other hand identifies nationalities by their English name or names using free term searching also in the .ti,ab,hw,kf, fields for Ovid MEDLINE. Line #4 combines the controlled vocabulary terms (#1) and the two free term searches (#2 plus #3) with the OR operator so as capture both MEDLINE indexed records as well as those not indexed or in the process of editorial review.
Search Stategy
europe/ or austria/ or belgium/ or exp baltic states/ or bulgaria/ or croatia/ or czech republic/ or hungary/ or poland/ or romania/ or slovakia/ or slovenia/ or exp france/ or exp germany/ or exp united kingdom/ or greece/ or ireland/ or exp italy/ or luxembourg/ or exp mediterranean islands/ or netherlands/ or portugal/ or "scandinavian and nordic countries"/ or exp denmark/ or finland/ or iceland/ or sweden/ or spain/
(Austria or Belgium or Bulgaria or Croatia or (Republic adj2 Cyprus) or Czech Republic or Denmark or Estonia or Finland or France or Germany or Greece or Hungary or Ireland or Italy or Latvia or Lithuania or Luxembourg or Malta or Netherlands or Poland or Portugal or Romania or Slovakia or Slovenia or Spain or Sweden or Great Britain or Northern Ireland).ti,ab,hw,kf.
(Austrian$1 or Belgian$1 or Bulgarian$1 or Croatian$1 or Croats or Cypriot$1 or Czech or Danish or Estonian$1 or Finnish or French or German$1 or Greek$1 or Hungarian$1 or Irish or Italian$1 or Latvian$1 or Lithuanian$1 or Luxembourger or Maltese or Dutch or Polish or Portuguese or Romanian$1 or Slovak$1 or Slovenian$1 or Spanish or Swedish or British or Northern Irish).ti,ab,hw,kf.
1 or 2 or 3
Reviewers
Primary: Michael Fanning
Secondary: Charlotte Viken
Review Date: 2024-05-08
Expiry Date: 2025-05-08
Original search produced by:
Ovid Training Team
References:
OvidGO! / Skills Videos
What are Boolean Operators?
What is an adjacency operator?
What are wildcards?
Subject heading searching
Truncation of keywords
Phrase searching on Ovid
Citation:
Ovid Customer Support, Thesaurus Challenges – Defining A Region (MeSH) – Ovid MEDLINE, OvidGO! / Focused Searches Portal, Version: 8th May 2024. Visited: < Insert Date >.