Finding Articles
In general to find articles you search for a general topic and then narrow the topic by combining searches or by using the limit functions.
Start with the most important concept and add others when doing subject searching.
Searching for authors is slightly different in that it is generally good practice to search for last name or last name and first initial followed by a truncation symbol, depending on how common the last name is. While PubMed generally uses two initials that is not true of all records, so when trying to be inclusive searching for all just last name and first intial or even just last name is a better choice.. Searching for Smith* will find far too many hits to be useful, a search for smith j* in the author field is much more useful. But on a less common name may be more inculsive, in case of errors in the database.
Unless you use specific field tags or phrase searching with double quotes, PubMed matches individual words and phrases in your search to MeSH. This means that PubMed behaves somewhat differently from any other database you may have used. After running a search look at Details to see what PubMed actually ran. In most databases I recommend running a number of small searches and combining them together. This is not as necessary in PubMed, but still works well when each of those searches is an individual concept and may find you additional information.
