Coverage: PubMed is a database of bibliographic information collected mainly from the life sciences literature. PubMed also provides access and links to the integrated molecular biology databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. MEDLINE is the major component of PubMed and is the National Library of Medicine’s database containing citations and abstracts from over 4,800 journals published around the world in the areas of clinical medicine, biomedicine, and health care. Medline includes references to articles dating from 1950 to the present.
To Start: From the KU Libraries’ Web page, select PubMed under “Information Gateway”. PubMed is a free Web resource.
To Search: At the query box, enter a word or phrase to search. PubMed uses Automatic Term Mapping that matches terms to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), journal titles, a phrase list, or an author index in that order. If the term is not matched, it is searched in all fields. The Details button displays your search strategy and how it was mapped by PubMed. From the Details screen, the search can be modified.
Truncation – (*) Retrieves plural and variations of words.
Example: Neoplas* retrieves “neoplastic, neoplasia, neoplasms,” etc.
Connectors – AND, OR, NOT – Enter in uppercase.
PubMed processes connectors from left to right. The order can be changed by enclosing an individual concept in parentheses.
Example: adolescen* AND (anorexia OR bulimia)
A set of records will be first be retrieved with the terms anorexia or bulima. That set is then combined with adolescents, adolescence, etc.
To search for a phrase that may not be a subject heading, enter double quotes around the phrase. The quotes turn off the automatic term mapping mechanism.
Example: “pressure point”
Search your term or phrase with Search Field Tags to limit to specific fields.
Helpful tags include:
Examples: Carlson R [au] and Kansas [ad]
Adolescen* [ti] AND (anorexia [ti] OR bulimia [ti])
J Biol Chem [ta]
“microdialysis sampling” [tiab] AND “in vivo”
The Limits function allows you to refine and narrow your search. Search terms can be restricted to a specific author or journal title. Other limits include specific age groups, language, gender, and human or animal studies. Citations can be limited by publication date.
Review articles are distinctly indicated on a separate tab by the number of results. Review articles can provide excellent background information on a topic.
MeSH Database provides the capability to select Medical Subject Headings for searching and to limit the term to a major concept. Subheadings can be selected to refine the search. Subheadings group together those citations on a particular aspect of a subject. If subheadings are selected, click Send to, then click Search PubMed.
Journals Database allows you to search for a specific journal and citations within that journal. You can search by full journal title, ISSN, or Medline abbreviation. You can enter a journal title abbreviation to locate the full title of a journal.
Single Citation allows you to locate a single citation by inputting various known elements, e.g. date, title words, journal, page numbers.
Display: The default for displaying search results is the summary format which is a simple citation. To modify the display, click the pull down menu by Summary. The Abstract format provides the summary, in addition to an abstract, if one is present, from the published article, author affiliation of the first author, and links to full-text of the article at the provider’s Web site, if available. Presently, some of the full-text articles are available if KU libraries subscribe to the electronic journal. Abstract Plus includes related articles based on common subject headings and terms.
Send To: This option provides four opportunities to retrieve, print, save, and e-mail records. Mark the records to print/save by clicking in the check box adjacent to the record number.
Text displays your records in plain text without the peripheral borders on the screen. Use the Web browser’s print function to print the records.
The File function creates a text file of your PubMed citations on your computer. You can save entire search results or selected citations.
The Clipboard function allows you to collect records from multiple searches. Mark records and indicate display format. Up to 500 records can be placed in the Clipboard and can be stored up to one hour after inactivity. Click Clipboard to pull up the saved records for printing/saving.
You can send records to a designated E-mail address.
My NCBI: This feature can be used to store search strategies that can be set to automatically run against database updates with the results sent to your e-mail account. Initially, you must register and login whenever it is used. Your Web browser must be set to accept cookies.
To store a search strategy, first run the search in PubMed. Click Save Search near the top of the screen. Enter a name for the search in the box provided and indicate if you would like to receive e-mail updates. You also have the option to save the searches and run updates selectively.
Contact information:
Judith Emde
785-864-4931
Watson Library
Copyright © 2008 by the University of Kansas