How to Use PubMed

PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 17 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources.

Case 1

You have partial information about a citation and want the complete reference.

Example
You have a partial citation: Ann Intern Med, 2003, pp 421-4, and you want to know the author, title, etc. Go to www.pubmed.gov. At the left click 'Single Citation,' enter ann intern med in the 'Journal' field, 2003 in the 'Date' field, and 421 in the 'First Page' field, and click 'Search.' [You could also enter the full journal title, Annals of Internal Medicine, in the 'Journal' field. If you are not sure of the exact journal title or its exact MEDLINE abbreviation, click 'Journals Database' at the left.] If the journal title you enter differs from MEDLINE's journal title, you will get a 'not found' error; click 'Journals Database' at the left.

The yellow pages icon with the three lines indicates an abstract exists. Click either the yellow pages icon or the author's name and you can read the abstract. In this instance, a full-text version is also available IF you are a subscriber.

Case 2

You want to see what research is in the MEDLINE journals about some topic.

Example
You want to see research about interdisciplinary geriatric teams. Go to www.pubmed.gov and in the 'For' box at the top enter interdisciplinary AND geriatric AND team. [Note CAP letters for Boolean terms.] Click Limits. Click the 'All Fields' box, and note the types of fields available. For this example, click the 'Title/Abstract' box since we want articles that have these terms as major emphases. Click the 'Publication Types' box. We could limit our search to Guidelines, RCT, etc. For now, leave the 'Publication Types' box in its default. In the two 'Publication Date' fields, enter 2000 and 2008 for starting and ending dates (leave the day and month boxes blank) to limit your search to more recent articles. In the 'Ages' drop-down list choose 65+ years. Click 'Go.' You will get a list of all PubMed citations matching your search.

Other features

If you click 'Details' you will see the query language actually used. To see all the search tags, click 'Help' at the left, scroll to 'References' at the bottom, and click 'Search Field Descriptions and Tags.'

Click 'History' to see the searches you have run. You can combine searches: as an example, in the 'For' box enter #2 AND #10 to combine your second and tenth searches.

To learn about other features in PubMed click 'Help | FAQ' or 'Tutorials.'

If you are a student/faculty member at MU you can access the on-line journals MU subscribes to by going to http://library.muhealth.org/ and clicking 'Ovid Databases.'