Searching PubMed well is a skill. In this post we walk through building a precise query with field tags and boolean conditions.
Start with the clinical question
Frame your question with PICO: population, intervention, comparison, outcome. This gives you the keywords that matter.
A good query is not the one that returns the most results. It is the one that returns the fewest irrelevant ones.
Use field tags
Restrict terms to title/abstract with [tiab], authors with [au], and journals with [ta]. Combine them with AND, OR, and NOT.
- sepsis[tiab] AND lactate[tiab]
- “machine learning”[tiab] AND radiology[ta]
In MediPub you can build these queries visually and save them for one-tap re-runs.
