MEDLINE Searching Strategies

Limits

MEDLINE offers a long list of Limits, parameters to help narrow your search strategy.

Several of the most frequently used limits are located on the main MEDLINE search page.

Limit	Restricts search results to only include articles:
OVID Full Text Available	with electronic full text through Ovid.
English Language	with text in English. (See more information below)
Review Articles	with the publication type Review Article. (See more information below)
EBM Reviews	which are evidence-based medicine reviews.
Abstracts	with abstracts in the database.
Latest Update	from the latest update of the database. (i.e., most recent)
Publication Year	from selected publication year(s). (See more information below)

In addition, there are more limits available if you click on the Limit icon in the Ovid toolbar (indicated below).

The Limit menu, which is only active after you have at least one set in your search history, uses click boxes and pull down menus for selecting options. Click on the yellow "i" (information icon) in MEDLINE for a more detailed definition for each limit.

Click box limits:

Pull Down menu limits:

The bottom half of the limit menu offers more extensive limits. (To select more than one limit from one pull down menu, use the control button and click on multiple limits.)

Using some of the most popular limits in your search strategy:

AIM Journals
AIM Journals refer to the titles in the Abridged Index Medicus list of journals. These are core journals frequently referred to by clinicians, including Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, as well as other very reputable and commonly cited publications.

Language
Limiting to English language is a very common. Even though the most frequently used language of science internationally is English, much work is still published in non-English languages. Because the collection of Scott Memorial Library is all-English, and, frankly because many researchers read only English, this limit is one of the most frequently used.

Animal Type
Here you can select the biological species of a subject. Researchers will frequently limit their searches to the animal type which they use in their own research studies. Clinicians usually search for human studies.

Publication Year
Publication Year is a very popular limit. One might limit to the "turning point year" for a particular area of research. One might limit to a single year when attempting to piece together a full citation to an article for which only the topic (or author or journal) and year are known. Most frequently, users limit to the current year or two to see the most recent publications.

Review Articles
Review Articles are overview articles, which summarize the state-of-knowledge on the topic in question. This limit can be useful for locating a few key articles.

A word of advice... Limits provide a quick and simple approach to narrowing search results. The limits that appear on the main search page are also available as click box limits, so it's possible to apply all of the appropriate limits in one step of your search strategy. Be careful, however, not to overuse them. If you select too many limits at once, the database may return few (or no) results. You may want to begin by selecting one limit at a time and examining your results. Determine which limits you find most important and use them first.