[CANMEDLIB] Recent surgery articles not being indexed as surgery-related in Medline

[Niki Baumann]

Hi colleagues,

I've just come across a phenomenon in Medline - it seems that there is a problem with the indexing for surgery-related articles.

I have some automated searches set up for surgery-related topics. Over about the past year, I've noticed that they are finding fewer and fewer results. Up until today, I thought it was because of research funding diversion to COVID research. However, it seems it is instead due to them not being indexed with surgery MeSH and subheadings.

Original search strategy:
exp *Melanoma/su, tr or exp *Sarcoma/su, tr or exp Surgical Oncology/ or *Neoplasms/su, tr

Test search:
(((melanoma* or sarcoma*) and (surg* or operati*)) or surgical oncology).ti.

I combined these with some searches for Canadian authors and articles added to the database in the past 12 months. The original search strategy found zero results - the test search found 20, which were relevant, but had not been indexed with surgery-related MeSH nor subheadings.

I then switched to PubMed and tried the following:
((surger*[ti] OR surgical*[ti] OR operati*[ti] OR resect*[ti] OR intraoperati*[ti] OR perioperati*[ti]) AND medline[sb] AND english[lang] AND (2023[mhda] OR 2023[edat] OR 2023[crdt]))

There were 21000+ results. I then combined this with surgery[subheading], which found only 12000+ results. I looked through some samples from the first page of the remaining 8000+ results, and although some had been indexed with Postoperative Complication terms, the majority had no surgery-related MeSH nor subheadings, even though they were definitely about surgeries. It seems that about 38% of the surgery related articles from the past year have not been indexed with surgery subheading, and 3700+ (18%) of these also were not indexed with ("Surgical Procedures, Operative"[Mesh] OR "Postoperative Complications"[Mesh]) - I sorted by most recent, and 18 of the first 20 results were about surgery.

I have reported the phenomenon to NLM, but in the meantime, you might want to try some keyword searches for any surgery-related topics while they investigate.

Hope you have a happy long weekend,
Niki



Niki Baumann
Librarian
Library Services
nbaumann at cpsbc.ca
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