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Which Is The Pubmed Query That Returns The Most Results?

For instance: 'diagnosis' gives back > 7 million results and that is roughly 1/3 of all the citations. I know that I am probably asking an 'irrelevant' search question as I am after the biggest scope, the inverse of relevant search.

pubmed search

I can see what you're getting at here, but I think a better way to state it is "what are the commonest terms in PubMed", rather than "which query". A query can be anything you like including, as shown by the answers, a query that returns everything. What the query does is match some terms in the database (title, abstract, MeSH etc.) Lars' answer explains this well.

sorry, just for curiosity: why are you asking this question?

you're right Neil, that's what I was after. Not really looking for tricks but for the commonest domain-specific terms. It answers Giovanni's curiosity too.

3 answers

all [filter] will give you all

Using the publication date between 1000 and 2011: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=search&term=1000%3A2011[PDAT]

Results: 1 to 20 of 20541957

Pierre, how do you get this result. Are you doing a query with mySQL? Is this something you can put on your blog. Would like to learn how this is done. Thanks!

If you query for 'publication formats' you get essentially all of PubMed back. The reason is that their automatic query turns extends this query to "publication formats"[Publication Type] OR "publication formats"[All Fields]. Almost entry in PubMed has a publication type, which is a child term of the MeSH term 'Publication Formats'.

The reason why 'diagnosis' gives as many results as it does is much the same. The query expansion turns it into "diagnosis"[Subheading] OR "diagnosis"[All Fields] OR "diagnosis"[MeSH Terms]. The latter MeSH term is one of the top-level terms.

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