Improving the Odds for Title Searching in PubMed

Improving the Odds for Title Searching in PubMed

Searchers often copy an article title from another source then paste it into PubMed for a search. If a phrase in the title matches with an author name it can cause the search to fail. To improve title searching, PubMed now ignores phrases that match with author/investigator names that are made up only of stopwords (e.g., During A, May BE, Just BY). For example, in the search for the title, Prediction of performance level during a cognitive task from ongoing EEG oscillatory activities, the phrase, during a, is ignored and the search retrieves the expected citation. This special effect occurs when the phrase is part of a string of other words, none of which have search tags. When a name is entered by itself, e.g., just by, it is interpreted as a name search. To search for an author name (that matches with stop words) plus other terms, use an author search tag, e.g., just by [au] AND seizure.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so08/so08_pm_title_searching.html