BIO 360: Biology Seminar

PubMed is a free resource developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine® (NLM). 

PubMed gives free access to MEDLINE, NLM's database of citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences.  

MEDLINE is NLM's bibliographic database of citations and abstracts, currently from approximately 5,400 biomedical journals published in the United States and worldwide. Coverage extends back to 1947 with over 20 million citations.

• What's the difference between Medline and PubMed?
• What are PubMed's "core" clinical journals?

The Basics: Simple Searching & Viewing Results

For a basic keyword search, type the word or words you are looking for into the search box, and click Search. PubMed will suggest phrases that complete your entry or that are related to the words you're entering.  The next page will show your search results.

Setting Limits

Use Limits in the top grey banner to narrow down your results by specifying different categories such as language, type of article, age, gender, etc.  

Saving, Printing, and Emailing Search Results

As you search PubMed you can temporarily store articles of interest on the Clipboard. To add an article to the Clipboard, check the box next to the article, and select Clipboard from the Send To link located to the upper-right corner above your search results. You will get a message stating that your article has been posted to the Clipboard.

After you have place items in the Clipboard, a link to the Clipboard will appear at the upper-right of your screen. To view all the items in the Clipboard, click that link. Articles already posted to the clipboard are marked below their citation information with "Item in Clipboard" in green in both the Summary and Abstract displays.

From here, you can decide what you would like to do with your citations. Using the Send To menu:

• Choose File if you want to save the citations as a text file.
• Choose Emailif you want to email them to yourself or someone else.
• Choosing Collections saves your citations to your My NCBI account.
• Choose Order only if you know that the Library doesn't subscribe to the journal(s) and you have a Loansome Doc account set up.

To print your citations, select Print from your Internet's browser window. 

To remove an item from the Clipboard, click the Remove from Clipboard link below the citation in green.