Banner Health FAQs

This answer has been revised July 2025

Dear Patron,

I can understand your frustration. This is a large topic and probably needs more focus to be a manageable topic. I would like to share with you a few search tips in PubMed to help you. I recommend PubMed because it is free and will be available to you throughout your professional life no matter where you work. 

In PubMed, like all research databases there are Filters (or Limiters). You can limit to age, gender, species, study type, language, years of publication, etc.

Secondly, research databases use Subjects (also called a thesaurus or controlled vocabulary) to bring together similar articles. This helps to eliminate variation in word choice by the author.  You don't have to guess if it should be OBESE OR OBESITY.  Once you have identified the subjects, you can use subject qualifiers to focus even more. An example of qualifiers is mortality; surgery; prevention and control; drug therapy; diet therapy; methods. Adding qualifiers to the subject provides more focused results. 

Third and final...research databases and even Google have ways to measure aboutness. While some article may touch on the topic of obesity interventions, other articles are wholly about obesity interventions. In PubMed, a topic can be designated a major mesh topic versus a general mesh topic. This is indicated by the qualifier [MAJR] or [MESH].

Here is the link for PubMed Medical Subject Headings (MESH) <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/>

• Search for obesity, weight gain, or other related topics
• Once you have chosen the subject, qualifier, and restrict to mesh major topic add them to the search builder and Search in Pubmed <see screen image>
• Repeat this process until you have all the relevant subjects

Return to PubMed <www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed>, and just below the search box you can see the word ADVANCED. Your search history is listed on the advanced screen. 

• Use the ... three dots to Add Query <screen image> and then add the next search with a Boolean operator <screen image>.
• Alternatively you can look at the results of the search again by clicking on the RESULTS number

Once you have a list of results that look more or less on topic, use the Filters to narrow the results. Scroll to the bottom of the Filter list to find ADDITIONAL FILTERS.

In your request, you wanted an intervention that is successful. What is success; is it weeks, months, years or is it going from obese to overweight or is it never becoming obese? Are you interested in any specific type of intervention; diet therapy, surgery, behavioral, drug therapy, etc. (all qualifiers under Obesity)? A successful therapy in medicine means it has been tested and retested repeatedly and then all the research analyzed together, i.e. a systematic review or meta-analysis (PubMed filter under study type).

If you do not have answers to these questions, you may want to review the results of your searches to see if you can narrow down your topic and identify additional keywords along the way. This is part of the process we call discovery. 

PubMed is an amazing FREE platform and will serve you well throughout your life.