Controlled vocabularies are used for the following extracted fields: chemicals and drugs, MeSH Plus (MeSH = Medical Subject Headings), conditions, devices, targets, and organizations.
Extracted Fields and Search Results
Where controlled ontologies are used, the taxonomic hierarchy within the ontology is searched in a way that returns results for the search term or phrase, as well as related terms or phrases that occur lower in the hierarchy in a broad to narrow fashion. For example, searching for cancer will return records containing leukemia, even if cancer is never mentioned in the record. This is because, within the MeSH taxonomy, leukemia is a type of cancer. The search returns results beginning at the level of specificity used in the search and travels down the taxonomic hierarchy to include narrower terms and phrases that are subtopics related to the search. However, searching for leukemia will not return results containing the term cancer without the term leukemia because the search returns only terms or phrases that are narrower and lower down in the taxonomic hierarchy.
Filtering works in a similar manner. Filtering on the term cancer will return records with only leukemia mentioned in the text.
When searching, use the Preferred field variant to match the term without including narrower topics or the BroadSynonym field variant to match the term with subtopics included. You can also use an exact syntax to be as specific as possible.
High-level MeSH headings that contain an "and" have been hand pruned to prevent a search conducted for one of the terms in the phrase from returning results that contain only the other term.
By default, the search fields use the Broad synonym. See the Grant Organization example below:
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Organization (Broad Synonym)
- Example: organizationBroadSynonym:"University of California, San Francisco"
- On 02/03/2026, 57,843 results were found in the grants search.
- https://analytics.nih.gov/results/publicgrants?ID=dfe79f96-99eb-44c5-a364-637a074a9759
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Organization (Exact)
- Example: organizationBroadExact:"University of California, San Francisco"
- On 02/03/2026, 57,801 results were found in the grants search.
- https://analytics.nih.gov/results/publicgrants?ID=ec0cdf15-745c-494e-893e-df7073037195
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Organization (Preferred)
- Example: organizationPreferred:"University of California, San Francisco"
- On 02/03/2026, 57,406 results were found in the grants search.
- https://analytics.nih.gov/results/publicgrants?ID=e422c64c-6668-4f93-b0f9-47e8cd11a6f9
Synonyms and Search Results
Likewise, where controlled vocabularies are used, synonyms for the search term or phrase are also searched and included in the results. For example, searching for JHU will also return results for Johns Hopkins University.
Data sources and updates
- Organizations are a custom vocabulary and updated as needed.
- Targets come from www.guidetopharmacology.org and are not scheduled for updates currently because they require extensive hand editing.
- MeSH Plus are extracted terms sourced from the NLM MeSH thesaurus. NLM typically updates MeSH terms yearly, but the terms used in iSearch Analytics have not been updated since the 2020 NLM updates because they require editing by hand.
- Conditions are a pruned version of MeSH that is hand edited by OPA analysts.
- Devices came from FDA and MeSH and were compiled by hand. Updates aren't scheduled.