PubMed Guide

Searching PubMed

PubMed

PubMed, also known as Medline, indexes literature in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and life sciences. It contains bibliographic citations and abstracts from more than 4800 biomedical journals published in the U.S. and other countries; coverage extends from 1966 to present.

See the PubMed HELPsite for complete details and search examples for the database.

Each reference appears as a record containing searchable fields, including:

author
title
source (journal)
indexing terms known as Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH

Medical Subject Headings

MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. Using MeSH terms generally results in more relevant searching than using free text keywords.

Create PubMed searches using the MeSH Database (linked from the PubMed search page).
MeSH terms are selected by indexers to indicate articles' subject content.
Subheadings for MeSH terms describe a particular aspect of a subject, for example, you can specify that you want to find diagnosis or drug therapy for a particular disease.
See PubMed's MeSH Browser for definitions of terms and details about hierarchical relationships among words.

Limits

Clicking the Limits tab on the search screen allows you to restrict searches by several criteria, such as:

links to online full text of articles specific age group	specific author or journal gender
human or animal studies	language of publication
publication type (clinical trial, practice guideline, letter, review article)	subset of PubMed, such as Complementary Medicine or Toxicology
date

Note: If you apply Limits, then the check-box next to Limits will be marked when search results appear, and a listing of your limit selections will display. Limits remain active until you change them. back to top

Preview/Index

The Preview/Index tab facilitates building a search in a logical, step-by-step process.

Preview shows the number of search results before displaying the citations.
Index provides an alphabetical list of terms used in the database (a number appears in parentheses to the right of each term indicating how many citations contain that word).
Choose the field in which you want a term to appear (e.g., author, title, journal, substance name, MeSH term).
Click on the connector terms AND, OR, or NOT to tell the computer how to add search words to the query.
To select multiple terms from one Index list, hold down the Ctrl-key (PC) or the Command-key (Mac), and click on each individual term. back to top

Displaying Search Results

The defaut display is called summary format. Use the pull-down menu to see other options; select the one you want and click the "Display" button.

Display formats include:
Summary- the default view	Citation- includes both abstract and MeSH headings
Brief- includes author, first part of title, PubMed record i.d. number	MEDLINE- two-character tagged field format (NOTE: use this option for downloading records into EndNote)
Abstract - includes abstract but no MeSH headings

Send To... Print, Save, E-mail results

The pull down menu in the Send To area allows you to manage selected records. Options include:

Text: reproduce selected records in plain text on a new web screen; this is useful for printing
File: save records to a file in plain text or html format
Printer will print selected items.
Clipboard: store (or remove) items on a clipboard (up to 500 items can go on the clipboard; data is erased after 1 hour of inactivity)
E-mail: send records to email addresses
RSS Feed saves the search to run automatically and deliver results to an RSS feed reader
Order: documents may be purchases through fee-based agreements with the NLM

History

This displays your activities for the current search session. You may combine search sets using their numbers, e.g., #1 and #2 would combine the two results sets for those search statements. back to top

MyNCBI

Formerly called "Cubby," MyNCBI allows you to create an account where you can save searches. You may specify the frequency that PubMed will run saved searches automatically and send you e-mail alerts when new relevant records are added to the database. You can use this feature as a table of contents service for journals indexed by PubMed. back to top

Finding Articles at Utah State University Library

Often you will discover that links within PubMed may not direct you to the full text of articles. Using a sample citation, the steps below demonstrate how you can find out how to obtain full articles.

Sample citation: Smith J, Dearmun A. Improving care for children requiring surgery and their families. Paediatric Nursing. 2006; 18(9):30-33.

Identify the name of the journal. In this instance, the journal is Paediatric Nursing.

1. Check for electronic access to the journal. On the Library Home page, drag your mouse cursor over Find Resources and click on the link to Electronic Journals List from the fly-out menu.

Enter the title of the journal in the text box. Click Search.

If electronic access is available, you will see links similar to the following:

Notice the dates available to determine if they include the date you need. For our example, we need 2006.

Click one of the links that matches the date for your citation and drill through the issues available online. For this example, we are looking for volume 18, issue no. 9, pages 30-33.

Displays vary because different publishers provide online editions of journals. Ask for help if you get stuck!

2. If we do not have electronic access, you will see a result that says " 0 records retrieved for the search."

When this happens, you should then search the library online catalog for the Journal Title. Follow the steps for Requesting Journals from the BARN < http://library.usu.edu/instruct/tutorials/libresearch/pop-barn.html >.

3. If the article isn’t available either electronically or in print, you can request a copy of the article from Interlibrary Services < http://library.usu.edu/ill/index.php >

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