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Systematic reviews: Text mining tools

Text mining

What is text mining?

  • Identifies new search terms that you may not have considered, based on an existing set of key papers relevant to your topic
  • Software "mines" (analyses) the records and pulls out subject headings, text phrases and other data that helps you extend your search strategy to find new records

When is it useful?

  • Systematic reviews or extensive literature reviews where it is important you don't miss anything
  • Not necessary for standard literature searches 

Quick links

About text mining tools: Yale MeSH Analyzer

The Yale MeSH Analyzer creates a spreadsheet from a set of known articles, clearly setting out fields such as title, abstract, MeSH headings and author assigned keywords. Spreadsheets can be exported in an Excel format and they are easy to scan for search terms that you may never have thought of. These can then be used to search for new articles.

This video from https://mesh.med.yale.edu/help explains it very well:

More information on how to use the Yale MeSH Analyzer - https://mesh.med.yale.edu/help

Citation: Grossetta Nardini, H. K., & Wang, L. (2021). The Yale MeSH Analyzer. Retrieved from http://mesh.med.yale.edu/ 

About text mining tools: PubMed PubReminer

PubMed PubReminer analyses a set of known articles from PubMed, pulling out MeSH subject headings, and commonly used words and phrases. 

You can run a search by entering a few simple terms. Here I entered bipolar AND children AND australia

The tool runs the search in PubMed and pulls out key terms in order of frequency. You can choose which columns to display, including author, country, journal, MeSH, publication type, substance, word and year. Results are initially set out like this:

 

If you click on Create CV Output it creates a result page with a persisting link such as this - https://hgserver2.amc.nl/cgi-bin/miner/cvgen.cgi?file=pubmed_pubreminer-1631841672-6310.txt

At the top are standard citations, but if you keep scrolling it will take you to a lovely MeSH Cloud where you can easily see the main subject headings used in those records. It looks something like this cloud from a different topic:

Mesh cloud example from PubMed PubReminer

Guide Author

Helen Wilding, Senior Research Librarian

Carl de Gruchy Library, St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne
Helen.Wilding@svha.org.au

Literature Searching, Systematic Reviews, Mental Health liaison 
Thursdays, Fridays & alternate Wednesdays
Helen's profile | Researchgate | Orcid