PubMed Subject Searching Avoids Conflicts with Journal Titles

Maybe you've never noticed this before but upon occasion, when you type in terms expecting to do a subject search you get bizarre results - PubMed maps what you've typed to a Journal search. This usually happens when you type something like 'brain development'. The way PubMed treats this is to first look in the MeSH translation table and if there is not a match, it then goes to the Journals Translation table - where it will find a match 'Brain Dev[Journal]'. Probably not what you expected!

NLM is adding to the exceptions table (which now contains heart failure, pediatric surgery, and treatment review) so that other subjects won't be treated as journals by default.

See the NLM Technical Bulletin for all the details.