Scientific information in times of pandemic: analysis of indexing time of journal articles with controlled vocabulary in PubMed

Abstract

Introduction/Objective: It presents a theme linked to the retrieval of scientific information contained in the PubMed search engine whose objective is to verify delays in the indexing of scientific publications with the terms of the controlled vocabulary Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Methodology: Includes bibliographic research for thematic contextualization, and is exploratory and descriptive with practical applicability on subjects related to the Covid-19 pandemic. A search strategy was built on PubMed with 16 terms related to the theme in the MeSH Terms and Text Word fields. The study was published in 2021 in the Portuguese language. The metadata of the 85 publications were exported for analysis in a spreadsheet under the aspects of entry of the publication in PubMed, time until indexing with the MeSH terms and category of the publication. Results: About 89% of the publications, considering the sample of 62 items, had a delay in indexing of at least 15 days; and about 11% collapsed in 15 to 135 days. Conclusion: In order for researchers to be able to retrieve the most scientific content on COVID-19, it is essential that they are constructed of searches that contemplate the use of the MeSH controlled vocabulary term combined with the use of the nomenclature variations of the theme in other fields, such as Text Word, since publications may appear in the search engine, but have not yet been indexed, in order to retrieve a greater number of scientific literature already published.