PubMed: Getting Started
What is PubMed?
PubMed is a free search interface that offers access to over 24 million biomedical citations from the MEDLINE Database, available in Ebscohost @ IWU, and other sources.
PubMed covers 5600 life science journals from 80 countries, as well as National Library of Medicine online books. Coverage runs from 1946 forward.
PubMed is produced and updated daily by the U.S. National Library of Medicine
In addition to MEDLINE citations, PubMed also contains:
- Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing.
- In-process citations to articles before they are indexed with MeSH® and added to MEDLINE.
- Some OLDMEDLINE citations that have not yet been updated and converted to MEDLINE status.
- Citations to out-of-scope articles (e.g. general science or chemistry) from journals in which the life sciences articles are covered in MEDLINE.
- Citations from additional life science journals from PubMedCentral receiving a qualitative review by NLM.
- Citations for the majority of books and book chapters available on the NCBI Bookshelf.
Getting Started in PubMed
The best way to search PubMed is by using the MeSH subject headings, or Medical Subject Headings. However, for a quick search, click on the Advanced Search link at the top of the PubMed homepage.
- Go to the Search Builder box
- Begin typing a term and click the Index link to see a list of the database's related terms.
- Choose AND, OR or NOT from the drop-down based on whether you want to require a second term in the results (AND), include an alternate term (OR), or eliminate a term (NOT).
- Click Search to run your query, and repeat as necessary for refined results.
- The results may also be refined by using the filters in the left facet of the results page.
