PubMed and the Expansion of Pharmacological Action Terms

The ability to search for Pharmacological Action (PA) terms was introduced in PubMed in 2003. See the article Nahin AM. Pharmacologic Action Headings: PubMed. NLM Tech Bull. 2003 Jul-Aug;(333):e6. for background information and to learn how this feature facilitates searching for drugs and chemical substances with particular actions (see also How to Search Using PA Terms below.)

Earlier this year, the lists used by PubMed were revised. (See a sample list.) Now, the lists may include terms with a Pharmacological Action that is an indention of the “list” term in the MeSH hierarchy. An example is the drug Amitriptyline. This heading is assigned the PA, Antidepressive Agents, Tricyclic which is an indention of Antidepressive Agents in the hierarchy of MeSH headings (see Figure 2).

How to Search Using PA Terms

* Use the [pa] search tag, e.g., caustics [pa].
* Each PA term has an entry in the MeSH database, where you can use the Links menu to do a PA search (see Figure 4).
o Use the link from the name of the PA to see the list of drugs and chemicals included in the search.
* Note: If a PA term is entered without a search tag, PubMed will search the term as in this example using Caustics:
o “caustics”[MeSH Terms] OR “caustics”[Pharmacological Action] OR caustics[Text Word]

Source: NLM Technical Bulletin

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 and is filed under Cataloging and Metadata, Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.