Searching PubMed for Arctic Medicine material

There is no better time to consider the subspecialty of Arctic Medicine than after a record cold January! Well, maybe August, but where is the fun in that! So, let’s begin the new year by learning how to search PubMed for articles on Arctic Medicine. Grab a hot drink and let’s get started.

Arctic Medicine is a subspecialty, born from the need of early Arctic explorers for medical care. Currently research in this area focuses on indigenous care or falls into the realm of military medicine. To illustrate a PubMed search, we will focus on how health services are delivered to inhabitants of these harsh and remote areas. 

As we all know, PubMed is indexed with MeSH Terms; however, there is no MeSH term for the concept of “Arctic Medicine”. That means we will need to put on our thinking caps and come up with a list of keywords that will describe this concept. Here’s a hint: You can find applicable Mesh terms (see below) and keywords for a concept by doing a quick keyword search in PubMed and then reviewing the retrieved articles. Here’s another hint: an excellent use of AI is to ask it to generate a list of synonyms for a keyword. 

Here are some Mesh terms and keywords I found by reviewing articles: Arctic Regions[Mesh] OR “polar medicine” OR “arctic medicine” OR circumpolar OR Inuit[Mesh] OR Sami OR "Lapps people" [Supplementary Concept] OR Alaskan Natives[Mesh]

NOTE: I have included terms that describe areas along with ethnicities. You may wonder why? These ethnic groups are part of the Polar North, and when combined with my second concept, as shown below, can be used as proxies for the area. 

Now, let’s look for terms to describe our second concept of health services. By reviewing my initial search I found the following terms: Health Services Research[Mesh] OR Indigenous Health Services[Mesh] OR Delivery of Health Care[Mesh] OR “health services” OR healthcare OR “health care”

Remember to enclose each concept in parentheses and use the AND operator to combine them. I also like to add the field tag [tiab] to limit a keyterm to just the title and abstract of an article. (If you want to learn some Tips and Tricks for using PubMed, click here.)

So, here is the search I would begin with:  (Arctic Regions[Mesh] OR "polar medicine"[tiab] OR "arctic medicine"[tiab] OR circumpolar[tiab] OR Inuit[Mesh] OR Sami[tiab] OR "Lapps people"[Supplementary Concept] OR Alaskan Natives[Mesh]) AND (Health Services Research[Mesh] OR Indigenous Health Services[Mesh] OR Delivery of Health Care[Mesh] OR "health services"[tiab] OR healthcare[tiab] OR "health care"[tiab]) 

This search yields a little over 1470 hits. Remember you can use the Limits on the left-hand side of PubMed to reduce your article count. Reducing by year, publication type and language are always quick ways to get a more manageable retrieval. 

If you ever have questions about how to search, how to best generate keyterms, which databases you should use, feel free to contact the Holman Biotech Commons.