MedlinePlus is a product of the National Library of Medicine, but should not be confused with PubMed or MEDLINE.
Search for a topic and you will find basic information from the National Library of Medicine website, and pre-approved links to external websites, including pages from the National Institutes of Health and trusted health care partners such as other government websites and non-profit research organizations. In addition to providing a clearinghouse for evaluated health information, it also has a medical dictionary, encyclopedia, and drug reference section. A single keyword search will bring up results in all of these areas.
For searching the medical literature (reviewed journal articles), use PubMed, available freely on the web*.
Some quick tips on searching PubMed are found below, but more detailed instructions are available, prepared by our Health Science librarians:
When you search in PubMed, your search terms will automatically be translated by PubMed into a broad search on your topic, using the 'correct' medical terms (called Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH terms) if possible. Click on the 'Details' tab to see how your search was interpreted.
Click on the 'Limits' tab to further refine your search by age, gender, broad topic, language of publication, or publication type. For example, the 'Systematic Reviews' subset will retrieve citations identified as systematic reviews, meta-analyses, reviews of clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, consensus development conferences, guidelines, and citations to articles from journals specializing in review studies of value to clinicians. You can see more information about an article by clicking on the title, or changing your Display type from Summary to Abstract or Abstract Plus.
To locate the full text of an article, you can click on the button to see if you have access to an electronic copy or to see if we have the print journal in our collection.
*While you can get to the general PubMed site at http://www.pubmed.gov/, using https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?otool=mcolib,ohiolink&myncbishare=mcolib/ will get you to a version customized for University of Toledo researchers. The Find It! link can tell you if the University of Toledo subscribes to a journal or has access to an electronic version of the article.
This video shows how to use the GET Search and Interactive Tools features of Knovel. For assistance with basic searching with Knovel contact a librarian.