COVID-19 Funding Guide: Search Terms

• COVID-19 Funding Guide: Introduction
  • Guidance for Researching and Seeking Funding
  • Searchable Grant Databases
  • Acknowledgements
• Opportunities and Websites
  • Curated Lists of Funding Opportunities
  • Other Relevant Websites
• Search Terms
  • Medical Subject Headings
  • Other Search Terms
  • Sample Search String
• COVID-19 Citation Database
  • Database Location
  • Searching
  • Keywords
  • Retrieve Articles
  • Create Bibliographies

The official name of the virus involved in this pandemic is SARS-CoV-2; the official disease name, bestowed in February, 2020, is COVID-19. Many databases require the use of specific thesaurus terms or controlled vocabulary to more accurately find results. The use of such terminology may vary by database.  Below are some standard terms associated with the vocabulary and terminologies of COVID-19 that may be helpful. 

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) for COVID-19

Standardized terms used in the PubMed database from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. In some databases, it will be most effective to use each of these terms in quotes. 

Virus

• SARS-CoV-2
• severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2

Disease

• COVID-19
• 2019-nCoV

Other Search Terms

An asterisk in many search interfaces finds terms with a common stem. So the term coronavir*  allows most search interfaces to find terms that start with the common stem coronavir. The term hcov is a shorthand for human coronavirus (not just SARS-CoV-2) in many technical papers, and it also may be useful in a grants search or citation search.

• coronavir*
• hcov

Sample Search String

The following search string can be copied and pasted into a search box. The search will return items with those terms in the title or abstract. 

Title=("COVID-19" OR "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2" OR "2019-nCoV" OR "SARS-CoV-2" OR coronavir* OR hcov) OR Abstract=("COVID-19" OR "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2" OR "2019-nCoV" OR "SARS-CoV-2" OR coronavir* OR hcov)