While PubMed’s advanced search is most often used to combine previous searches together to create more complex strategies and to rerun previous searches, it has other functions that are often overlooked. The default field codes are All Fields, however by clicking on the drop down button reveals an expansive number of options to customize your search. Below are some of the most useful, but often overlooked field codes.
Affiliation: This field code searches the author affiliations. For example, this can be used to search for results where one of the authors is affiliated with MSK (or was at the time of publication).
Author-First/Author-Last: These field codes identify results where the author is only the first or last author listed. This can be useful when looking for articles that came out of specific labs (as the last author is typically the primary investigator).
Author-Corporate: This field code can be used to narrow down when an author is not a person, but rather a group/organization/corporation.
Grant Number: This field code can locate articles associated with a specific grant number, which can be helpful for keeping up with public access compliance, or identifying trends in research.
