On Doctoring MEDLINE searches, with reference librarian comments, March 2000

The question was

What is the role of hematological phagocytes (specifically Neutrophils
and Macrophages) in thrombocytopenia ?

1     Thrombocytopenia/bl [Blood]    results= 611   
2     Neutrophils/    results= 19430   
3     1 and 2    results= 14   
4     Macrophages/    results= 17617   
5     1 and 4    results= 4   
6     1 and 2 and 4    results= 0   

Reference Librarian comments

Hello -- thanks for participating in the exercise. I have a couple of ideas:

a) always "explode" the subject heading. Because you didn't, your sets are too little.

b) selecting the subheading "blood" in set #1 is entirely logical. a good idea. but when you then get too little in the way of retrieval, I guess you need to go back and NOT do that limitation.

I did the search, as below. Notice how much huger the sets are, because of exploding -- and then this pays off nicely at the end. If you thought 121 was too much, you could "focus" the subjects in sets #2 and #3 -- and then we'd get 54. (I'm searching in the "big" Medline database, 1966 to the present -- so we could also get fewer articles by limiting to fewer, more recent years...

Medline 1966 to January 2000

#
Search History
Results
1
exp *thrombocytopenia/
13570
2
exp neutrophils/
45406
3
exp macrophages/
64587
4
1 and (2 or 3)
170
5
limit 4 to (human and english language)
121