On Doctoring MEDLINE searches, with reference librarian comments

The question was

"Long term (5 years or more) mortality of breast
carcinoma patients following bone marrow transplantation"

1 :  exp *Breast neoplasms/         {69260}
2 :  exp *Bone marrow transplantation/         {16689}
3 :  1 and 2         {222}
4 :  limit 3 to (human and english language and yr=1988-1999)         {196}
5 :  Mortality/ or Survival rate/         {48106}
6 :  4 and 5         {18}
7 :  from 6 keep 1-10          {10}

Reference Librarian comments

Nice work. When I first looked at your strategy, the first thought
was "why didn't this person use 'mortality' the SUB-HEADING, attached
to breast neoplasms....?" Then I did the search, and discovered
that there is indeed a little tricky-ness in this subject for some
reason. (Statistics, mortality data, etc. are frequently troublesome
concepts in Medline...) I noticed that you used the larger (1966 -
Present) MEDLINE, which I think was a good idea. I played around
with this a little bit, and decided that you can't quite rely on the
"mortality" subheading, and that the concept of "long term" mortality
can't really be searched for. You have to browse through the
references and see if the mortality they're talking about is
long-enough to suit you.

Here's what I did, which is too fancy, really.

1 :  exp *breast neoplasms/
2 :  exp bone marrow transplantation/
3 :  1 and 2
4 :  exp "outcome assessment (health care)"/
5 :  exp mortality/ or exp survival rate/
6 :  mo.fs.
7 :  3 and (4 or 5 or 6)

66 references. (I'll append these 66 to the end of this message,
just in case you're interested...)