Nuts as a healthy food is a very popular research topic - Two of the top eight articles in an Altmetric.com survey of the top 100 research articles in 2013 were on nuts in the diet. With the importance of nuts, then, it’s important that articles on the subject be able to be searched efficiently in PubMed. We will offer tips on how to do this.
Like many plant-based foods, searching for nuts in PubMed is tricky. “Nuts” is a MeSH term in PubMed, but it’s not an explosion, so it often does not work to retrieve articles on specific kinds of nuts. So, for example, most articles with specific kinds of nuts in the title (walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, etc) are not indexed with the MeSH term “nuts.” Another problem is that nuts (and other plant-based foods) are often only indexed by their botanical name and with no nutrition-related indexing. In our poster, we will look at search examples for different kinds of nuts and discuss strategies for maximizing retrieval.