Consult Meva about Your PubMed Data

Move the mouse over a parameter name for tooltips or click on it for help. Look at the example.

Quick Guide how to Analyze a PubMed File with Meva

1. Search in PubMed^® for the topic you are interested in. Avoid to receive more than 10 MB (about 3,000 articles) from PubMed, otherwise use MePrep. Adhere to PubMed's restrictions for large downloads.
   Example: You want to explore vitamin c deficiency caused by chronic alcohol abuse. To include most of the articles in your retrieval (high recall) and, additionally, to exclude junk (high precision), you can search for medical subject headings provided by PubMed's MeSH. Thus, instead of a simple full-text search for say vitamin c alcohol you can do a qualified search for ascorbic acid[mh] AND alcoholism[mh]. After pressing ENTER or Go, you will receive a listing of articles.
2. Save your listing as MEDLINE file onto your computer.
   Example: In the PubMed form, select Display MEDLINE, Send to File, then press the Send to button. Choose a name for the file to save, say vitc-alc.fcgi.
3. Consult: Select the bibliographic fields¹ you wish to analyze as well as the name of your saved file in the form above. If you'd like to have links inside Mevas result pointing into PubMed, you should enter your PubMed search expression in the link restrictor line. Adjust some further parameters if you like (see form help) and submit the form to Meva.
   Example: You want to learn more about who wrote on what. Choose Author as field 1 and MeSH Terms² as field 2 (or vice versa, if you are more interested in MeSH terms). Provide an asterisk (*) as search filter for MeSH terms to retrieve only major topics³. Select your saved PubMed file - vitc-alc.fcgi - in the file name field. Enter your PubMed search string - ascorbic acid[mh] AND alcoholism[mh] - into the link restrictor field. Finally press the consultation button. You can also look at this example.
4. Analyze: Meva analyzes your PubMed file and returns its result as an HTML page to you. If PubMed allows a field-specific search for a bibliographic value found by Meva, you can trigger a new PubMed search for it by clicking onto this value in the result page. You can read abstracts or the full text in PubMed then or refine your search proceeding with step 2...

¹ All bibliographic information of a MEDLINE article (e.g. author, title, subject headings etc.) is structured as a list of fields.
² MeSH terms are medical subject headings used to describe the topics discussed in an article.
³ Major topics are MeSH terms that are one of the main topics discussed in the article denoted by an asterisk on the MeSH term or MeSH/Subheading combination in the MEDLINE file, e.g. Sarin/*toxicity. An asterisk as a MeSH term filter causes Meva to process only major topics.

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