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Public Health

This guide contains resources from the University Library to help with your study and support your research in Public Health.

Diabetes Resources

Using MeSH for diabetes 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 diabetes topics. Diabetes alone is not a MeSH term, but it is associated with the MeSH term Diabetes Mellitus, which has a number of more specific terms associated with it. You can see these listed in the MeSH database.

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 type 2 diabetes and diet:



PubMed Search Strategy:

"diabetes mellitus, type 2"[majr] AND "diet"[majr] AND English[lang]

This search strategy uses the headings Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 and diet. The section in the square brackets includes majr - which focuses the search on articles where the subject is a major issue in the article. The search is then limited to articles which are in English or which have English abstracts.

The MeSH term Diet includes many narrower subcategoriese subcategories, including Diet, Mediterranean, Diet, Vegetarian, Diet, Atherogenic and others. See the full list here: