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PubMed has more than 34 million records in 30+ languages, encompassing the largest biomedical research and clinical health sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical and bioengineering database in any language. MEDLINE citations are included and updated daily.
When you access PubMed via a search engine, you are only accessing the free component of PubMed (PubMed Central or PMC). When you access PubMed through TWU Libraries, you will access all its components, which include MEDLINE and PubMed.
To conduct a basic search, just use the search box provided on the PubMed homepage.
To do an Advanced Search, click on the "Advanced" link just below the Basic Search box.
The advanced screen (seen below) allows the searcher to build a more tailored search via fields and Boolean operators.
Searching specific fields, or narrowing your results to keywords in the Title/Abstract, can give you more specific results, especially if you're getting a lot of results when doing a general search.
PubMed will automatically keep a history of all your attempted searches and number them. If you find after multiple attempts you got more hits from an earlier set of results, you can review your history, ascertain which search yielded the most citations in the "Results" column , and reuse that search by simply clicking on the hyperlink in the "Results" column for that search.
Once you have run a search in PubMed, your search results will include a list of limiters on the left hand side of your screen. (Choose the Filters icon on your mobile device to see the list of limiters.)
The full range of options within any given filter are not always visible. In the example above, the filter by "article type" shows six types of articles, but by clicking on "additional filters" toward the bottom of the limiter list, a pop-up window opens with the full list of almost 70 different publication types.
If you choose to add limiters to your search results page, it is NOT the same as actually applying them to your search results! Once your filters are on full display, you can click on them and choose to select or deselect what limiters you wish to apply.
Note: Only filters which are valid for your search results will appear. For example, if there are no clinical trials within your batch of results, then the filter for clinical trials will not populate.
Similar articles can be found by using the "Similar articles" link on the article detail page. PubMed compares the title and the abstract of the article selected for keywords. It also looks at subject headings and uses this extracted data to find similar articles.
The "Sorted by" menu has multiple options:
Most Recent and Publication Date can be organized by newest or oldest date; Author and Journal can be sorted A to Z or Z to A.
The "Sorted by" menu also lets you control what you're seeing in your search results; you can choose to see summaries and abstracts, or select PubMed or PMID to get plain text results that can be exported.
Is there a specific article you want to try and find, but you can't quite remember all of its publication details? Try PubMed's Single Citation Matcher, in the Find list of links just below the search box on its landing page.
Once you have selected it, you will see a form (pictured below) to fill out with as many details as you can remember.
When exporting more than one citation, PubMed will not directly send citations to RefWorks. Instead, it will create a file in your downloads folder which can be uploaded to RefWorks.
Create the export file:
This creates a file (which by default will save to your computer's Downloads folder). You will now need to upload the saved file to RefWorks.