PubMed Search Guide

This is a general guide to searching Pubmed, the world's largest database of biomedical citaitons and abstracts. The guide includes the following:

• Searching PubMed (including MeSH [Medical Subject Headings])
  An overview and links to detailed guides
• Obtaining Article Full Text
  • How to use PubMed@UToledo to locate any full text articles available
  • How to request electronic copies of articles not in the UToledo library system
• MyNCBI
  A free option to save results, receive notifications of new results on a topic, and more
• EndNote and PubMed
  A short guide with links to further information on how to import PubMed citations/abstracts into Endnote (a free citation management utility for UToledo affiliates)
• Need More Help?
  How to contact Mulford Librarians

PubMed is basically a free version of Medline.It lets you search millions of journal citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences.

It includes access to MEDLINE® and to citations for selected articles in life science journals not included in MEDLINE. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant Web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.

PubMed was developed  and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

New citations are added Tuesday through Saturday.

PubMed is not an acronym or abbreviation
It is an abbreviated form of Public/Publisher MEDLINE

• The Med part of the name refers to the MEDLINE database, which is what PubMed searches
• Pub refers to the free public access of MEDLINE or as publisher, since PubMed includes links to publisher web sites.

A special thank you to Misa Mi, Medical Librarian for originally authoring this guide, to Bridget Faricy-Beredo for curating it, and Janice Flahiff for suggesting links.