Delivering tailored literature search training for a departmental group is always a great opportunity for learning new things.  Today I helped a multiprofessional group who work in a tongue tie clinic.

This is the (cleaned up) strategy we ended up creating as part of the session:

1. MEDLINE; (tongue AND tie).ti,ab; 160 results.
2. MEDLINE; tonguetie.ti,ab; 6 results.
3. MEDLINE; ankyloglossia.ti,ab; 290 results.
4. MEDLINE; “tongue tie”.ti,ab; 157 results.
5. MEDLINE; 1 OR 2 OR 3 OR 4; 398 results.
6. MEDLINE; breastfeeding.ti,ab; 14979 results.
7. MEDLINE; (breast AND feeding).ti,ab; 14567 results.
8. MEDLINE; 6 OR 7; 27717 results.
9. MEDLINE; MOUTH ABNORMALITIES/; 1038 results.
10. MEDLINE; BREAST FEEDING/; 27307 results.
11. MEDLINE; 5 OR 9; 1383 results.
12. MEDLINE; 8 OR 10; 38085 results.
13. MEDLINE; 11 AND 12; 109 results.

The keywords are a nice example with some extra results by dropping the space and a solid alternate term in ankyloglossia that has a big impact on total results.

More interesting again is moving to the suject headings.  There is no Tongue Tie/ and it is not immediately clear what to go to from the alternatives offered up.  When in doubt try Pubmed and a tongue tie search in Pubmed returns the following search:

“Ankyloglossia”[Supplementary Concept] OR “Ankyloglossia”[All Fields] OR “tongue tie”[All Fields]

I had not met Supplementary Concept before (or if I have I forget).  When in doubt Google and that brough me to Mesh Record Types which explains these are for chemicals, drugs and rare diseases. Each is linked to a broader descriptor by the Heading Mapped to field (HM).

Sadly HDAS does not include HM in the “more fields” option and I cannot see a likely candidate in the list I tried HW but that came up blank.

For the purposes of my session I used the MeSH browser to look it up and found

I did not note the * at the time and wonder if I should have restricted to major terms but given the small numbers of articles involved I think it was fair to go with the whole heading.

Finally I also had a look in Cochrane where there is a protocol Frenotomy for tongue –tie in newborn infants (which does not come up if your search for ankyloglossia incidentally). The protocol claims there is Tongue Tie in MeSH – it is an Entry Term but it won’t map to it so not sure myself.

Welcome anyones ideas on how to explain this to people!