Research Guides: Search Hedges- Emory University: Home

What are Search Hedges?

Search hedges are a strategy used in information retrieval to account for uncertainty or variations in search terms. Creating a search hedge involves identifying synonyms, related terms, or alternate phrasings to ensure a researcher captures a wider range of relevant results. Search hedges enhance the effectiveness and uniformity of a search query by accommodating potential variations in how information is expressed.

Methodology

The Hedge Development team consists of members of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library’s Systematic Review Service. The team identified a list of recurring concepts from previous systematic review projects and subgroups were established to develop first draft searches. The draft searches were presented to the Hedge Development team for comments, edits, and approval.

This online library research guide categorizes the topics by the closest Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) term. For example, the “Persons” heading contains the search hedges for “Elderly”, “Indigenous Persons”, and “Pregnant Persons”. Each page contains 2 tabs: one with the developed PubMed search hedge and a general keyword search. Notes field 1) shows the date of the most recent review by the team, 2) explains any significant conditions or omissions that may impact use of the hedge and 3) list additional optional or historical terms researchers should consider for their projects.

External Search Hedges

PubMed	Humans (retrieves studies indexed with Humans or Humans & Animals)	NOT ("animals"[MeSH Terms] NOT "humans"[MeSH Terms])
	MeSH (retrieves only citations that have been indexed with MeSH)	medline[sb]
	Adults (retrieves articles with Adult Mesh terms alone, with both Adult and Children, or with no mesh terms (yet)	NOT (("child"[MeSH Terms] OR "Infant"[MeSH Terms] OR "Adolescent"[MeSH Terms]) NOT "adult"[MeSH Terms])
	*Topic Specific Queries* (AIDS, Bioethics, Cancer, Complementary Med, Developmental and Reproductive Toxicology, Dietary Supplements, History of Med., Space Life Sciences, Systematic Reviews, Toxicology, Veterinary Science)	NOTE: UPDATE FROM NLM (MARCH 2021): Selected Queries No Longer Updated

Shortcuts & Tools

Search 101 - SR Database Cheat Sheet	Google Doc
Strings Attached: CADTH's Database Search Filters	Search filters developed and maintained by CADTH’s (Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health) Information Services Filters Working Group.
Polyglot Search Translator	From the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare/Systematic Review Accelerator
BalanceBraces	Balance braces, parentheses, brackets, and tags in your code
Embase Query Translator	"Type or paste a PubMed query and then review the Embase translation. Different highlighting will be applied depending on the mapping between MeSH to Emtree and based on the impact on the query."
MEDLINE Transpose	"Translate a search query between Ovid MEDLINE and PubMed syntax."
MeSH on Demand	"MeSH on Demand identifies MeSH® terms in your submitted text (abstract or manuscript). It also lists PubMed similar articles relevant to your submitted text."
PubMed Pub ReMiner	Text mining tool for PubMed.
PubMed Search Strategies Blog	Curated lists of synonyms in MeSH and EMTREE databases for multiple diseases and conditions.
SWIFT-Review	"SWIFT-Review (“Sciome Workbench for Interactive computer-Facilitated Text-mining”) is a freely available interactive workbench which provides numerous tools to assist with problem formulation and literature prioritization."
World Bank Country and Lending Groups (LMICs by income level)
Yale MeSH Analyzer	"A MeSH analysis grid can help identify the problems in your search strategy by presenting the ways articles are indexed in the MEDLINE database in an easy-to-scan tabular format."