2. What is PubMed?
• PubMed is a powerful search engine
– Established in 1996 by NCBI at the NLM
– MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books
– Articles from at least 1914 to the present
– Available to anyone with an Internet connection
• no software installation required
– EBSCO and ISI are proprietary competitors
• PubMed Central
– Free archive of biomedical and life science journal articles
• PubMed Health
– Reviews of clinical effectiveness research
3. How is PubMed used?
• Simple search
– Single search box for keywords
• with auto-complete
– Keywords combined with Boolean AND
– Automatic Term Mapping
• MeSH
• Journals
• Full author author index
• Full investigator full investigator index
• When a match is made searching stops (e.g., physiology)
5. How is PubMed used?
• Advanced search
– Many fields available for key word searching
• Author, journal title, article title, abstract, dates, etc, etc
– Choice of Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT
– Auto-complete and show index combine powerfully
– Complex searches can be constructed and saved
– No (practical) limit to the number of clauses
– Components can be previewed, saved, and reused
– Search query language can be manipulated
7. How is PubMed used?
• Results
– Results are ranked by relevancy
• exact match on MeSH terms come first
• title matches are also highly ranked
– Narrowing the search is easy
• many facets available
• facets are configurable
• „clickable‟ date histogram
– Getting full-text
– Related articles
– Citation list
10. How is PubMed used?
• Other features
– Send results to…
• email
• citation managers
• file
• “My Bibliography” – login required
• more
– Results work with Zotero
– Searches can be saved
– Alerts can be generated
– RSS feed
13. How is PubMed used?
• Other tools
– Single Citation Matcher
– Batch Citation Matcher
• email a | [pipe] delimited list to retrieve PMIDs
– Clinical Queries
• limits results to clinical research areas
– Topic Specific Queries
• pre-built search query on a topic (e.g., cancer, ethics)
– PubMed Mobile
14. Is PubMed Perfect?
• Lacks capability to browse
• Coverage years by journal?
• No proximity searching
• Facet UI is clunky
• Generates queries it cannot run
• Tighter integration to citation managers
15. Why PubMed?
• Authoritative
• Expansive coverage
– 21,000,000 articles
– 25,000 journals
• Tight MeSH integration
• Well supported with help, guides, tutorials
• Free
– no login required for most features
– free login for other features
16. References
• Canese K. “PubMed Celebrates its 10th Anniversary!”
NLM Tech Bulletin 352 (Sep–Oct 2006): e5. Accessed
July
1, 2012.http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so06/
so06_pm_10.html.
• National Center for Biotechnology Information.
“About NCBI.” Last modified August 4, 2010.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/index.html.
• National Library of Medicine. “About the National
Library of Medicine.” Last modified May 10, 2012.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/about/index.html.
17. References
• University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas
Libraries. “PubMed and MedLine [sic] Differences.”
Last modified May 25, 2010.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/lsl/help/difference.html.
• PubMed Help [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National
Center for Biotechnology Information (US); 2005-.
PubMed Help. [Updated 2012 May 9]. Available from:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3827/.
• Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. “PubMed.” Last
modified June 21, 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PubMed&oldid=
498722726 .
