PubMed - PA 8104 - Introduction to Scientific Inquiry - SU 2016

PubMed Databases

PubMed This link opens in a new window
PubMed comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is the largest component of PubMed and consists primarily of journal citations; articles indexed with MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and curated with funding, genetic, chemical and other metadata.

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PubMed Clinical Queries
PubMed Clinical Queries is designed to quickly connect clinicians with evidence-based clinical literature in three research areas: Clinical Study Categories, Systematic Reviews, and Medical Genetics.

PubMed Central This link opens in a new window
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

NLM Search Tips and Tutorials

PubMed Tutorial (NLM)
PubMed is a free resource that provides access to MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine database of citations and abstracts. This tutorial was created by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) as an overview and guide for effectively searching PubMed.
PubMed Online Training (NLM)
NLM tutorials, webcasts, and online videos covering numerous PubMed features.
Using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) (NLM)
MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, used for indexing articles. Each article citation is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the citation and permits searching at various levels of specificity.

Instruction Highlights and Suggested Search Stratagies

What is PubMed? PubMed is the National Library of Medicine’s bibliographic database comprising of over 25 million biomedicine, health, life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering citations.

Keyword searching vs. MeSH controlled vocabulary: Understand the difference between keyword searching and using a controlled vocabulary (e.g. Subject Headings) when database searching.

Think both broadly and specifically with regard to search terminology: you will produce difference search results depending on whether you search using general/generic/popular language vs a brand name or technical term.

Use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to build advanced search strategies to produce better/more relevant results.

Drawbacks to MeSH: As articles need to be manually indexed, there is a several month to year delay in Subject Heading attribution or "tagging." Extremely recent articles may not be identified in a search. Additionally, the specificity of the applied terminology may preclude articles not tagged with your precise search term. This delay also applies to some filtering options, e.g. "Article Types."

Drawbacks to Keyword searching: colloquial terminology is inconsistent--your search term may not be one used in the article. It also produces many erroneous results given the commonality of terms, e.g. chest pain.

Save interesting articles to the PubMed Clipboard, your NCBI account, or exported to a Citation Manager! It's easier to have and have to cull too many articles than it is to recreate your search later.