O uso de descritores em artigos científicos na área de educação em saúde

Abstract

Introduction: The publication of scientific articles in journals is an efficient way of spreading research and new human knowledge in constant expansion. The subject headings act as a way of indexing publications and facilitating the search for them. Objective: In this article we evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively how different forms of research of the same subject heading (Health Education) influences the sample of articles obtained in the main database of medical journals in the world: PubMed. Method: The articles were searched in the PubMed database between 2000 and 2015, using the words Health Education in four different ways: Health Education, “Health Education”, Health Education [MeSH Terms] and Health Education [MeSH Major Topic] and compared quantitatively. MeSH is organized into a hierarchical tree-type network called MeSH Tree. For the qualitative evaluation, the results obtained in the period of 2002 and 2014 were used. Results: the use of subject heading (MeSH) provided a smaller number of articles retrieved, but these were more suited to the researched subject than those obtained by other forms of search. Conclusion: Search strategies with subject heading are better suited to topics that are much discussed in the literature. Subjects that are little discussed in the literature may be more difficult to find, and it may be necessary to use research strategies that can retrieve a greater number of articles.