Using MeSH for health promotion research:
MeSH (Medical Subject Headings): provides a consistent way to retrieve information where authors use different terminology for the same concepts. To search PubMed effectively, you will need to be aware of the MeSH terms used to search for topics relating to health promotion. Fortunately Health Promotion is a MeSH term but you may want to include the 'see also' MeSH term Health Behavior.
Exploding MeSH:
Many topics in MeSH have hierarchies of more specific subcategories or related terms. The indentations in the lists reflect the structure of the hierarchy. Any of these terms can be searched individually, or you can "explode" terms to search sections of the list.
MeSH Subheadings:
When you search for subjects using MeSH terms from the PubMed thesaurus you will also have the option of appending subheadings to narrow the focus of your search.
The following basic MeSH search strategy can be used to search for articles on health promotion and health behaviour:
PubMed Search Strategy:
"health promotion/td"[mh] AND "health behavior"[mh] AND English[lang]
This search strategy uses the headings health promotion and health behavior. Added to health promotion is the subheading "td" which stands for "trends". The search is then limited to articles which are in English or which have English abstracts.
From the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre) - part of the Social Science Research Unit (SSRU), Institute of Education, University of London.
This page contains links to:-
BiblioMap - a database of health promotion research
DoPHER (Database of Promoting Health Effectivesness Reviews) - a specialised register concentrating on reviews
TRoPHI (Trials Register of Promoting Health Interventions) - a web-based database of randomised controlled trials and controlled trials (non-randomised) of Public Health and Health Promotion interventions.