How PubMed's "Automatic Term Mapping" decides what your search means
NNLM trainer Margot Malachowski demonstrated how PubMed's Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) translates untagged search terms against subject (MeSH/UMLS), journal, and author tables in order and why that order affects results — with live examples (indigestion, backache, journal titles) and guidance on when ATM can mislead.
The full story
Margot Malachowski, an education and outreach coordinator with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Region 7, opened a recorded NNLM webinar by defining Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) as "PubMed's behind the scenes process that kicks in automatically when you enter terms into the search box without any sort of qualifiers such as tags or quotation marks." She showed how ATM tries to retrieve relevant results so users often do not need to add special syntax.
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