Disease

Disease Search provides many options for scanning the published biomedical research literature on diseases, disorders, abnormalities, syndromes and other pathologic conditions.

The Disease Name search box lets you look for an individual disease, disorder, etc. (e.g., acute lymphoblastic leukemia) or a family (group) of related conditions (e.g. leukocyte disorder).

A menu of disease subheadings enables a high level precision in query building.  The qualifiers you select here are retrieved only when indexed directly to the disease(s) typed at the top of the search page, greatly minimizing the chance of irrelevant citations.

Notes

  • Mapping to preferred terminology is automatically enabled in Disease Search.  It cannot be de-selected.  This ensures that any disease name you type will be matched to its corresponding Emtree term immediately. 
  • If you want to search for a disease name without mapping (e.g, only an alternate or archaic version of a disease name), choose Advanced Search and use whatever field labels or other qualifiers you need:

‘black death’:ti,ab

  • You can use Boolean operators to specify multiple disease names:

anorexia or bulimia or ‘binge eating disorder’

  • If a wildcard is entered, mapping is disabled and free-text search is run instead.  Exhaust* does not map to the Emtree term exhaustion (a sub-term of fatigue); instead, it finds exhaust (fumes or discharge), exhausts (e.g. depletes), exhausted, etc. in article titles, abstracts or other database fields in which the string occurs.

Very important:

Enclose multi-word phrases in quotation marks; they can be either single or double quotes, as long as they match each other.  This will ensure your phrase is searched as words adjacent to each other, in the order given.  For instance, ‘liver failure’ retrieves:

liver failure (diagnosis)

If quotes are omitted, the first word is mapped and subsequent words are searched free-text; all words are then combined with a Boolean AND operator, which can result in a large quantity of irrelevant results ("false hits"?), since the terms can occur at some distance apart from each other within a database record.  Liver failure (without quotes) can result in:

"Infants with IUGR and postnatal growth failure may be uniquely 'set up' for this outcome ..."? (in the abstract) and "lipid storage, liver, metabolism, necrotizing enterocolitis..."? (in the indexing)