PubMed: Medline with a Future

Laura LarssonResearch Librarian

Health Services

revised April 19, 2023

larsson@u.washington.edu

Objectives

learn how to use this new Web-based software to perform online database searches

learn basic and advanced searching specialized tips for finding citations

PubMed

New development in the area of online database searching

MEDLINE

bibliographic citations and author abstractsAll fields of medicine3,900 current biomedical journals published

in the United States and 70 foreign countries>9 million records dating from 1966+Medline is updated weekly and the records

incorporated into PubMed

PREMEDLINE

Basic citation information and abstracts done first, then MeSH added and record checked later on

New records added to PREMEDLINE daily

PubMed's Homepage

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed The sidebar provides help, an overview,

gives you NLM news and announcements, and gives you clinical queries with built in search "filters”

Graphic of Search Modes

Marvellous Features Include:

The Journal BrowserThe Citation Matcher programRelated articles, or, “More Like This!!!!”

The Journal Browser

The Journal Browser enables the viewer to look up journal titles by the title, keyword, title abbreviation or ISSN number.

The Citation Matcher

if you only have the author’s family name and the date,

you can locate the citation the author’s family name and the pages,

you can locate the citation the date and pages other variations on this theme

Related Articles

once you’ve found one article, you can click on Related Articles and find ones which have similar indexing and content

very, very usefulmore on this feature, below

Four different modes of searching

Basic SearchAdvanced SearchBoolean SearchClinical Queries

Basic Search Mode

Enter the terms in the query boxTerms are automatically ANDed

together so that all terms or concepts appear in the records displayed

Click on Search after all terms are added to enable the search

Author Searches

enter author as: surname iiif you enter larsson l, you will get back

larsson la, larsson lb, and so onuse quotes to prevent truncation from

occurring: “larsson l”

Author + Subject

health care administration “ross a”

Author + Article title

“ross a” moving into the twentieth

Journal Title Searches

enter the journal’s full name, e.g., journal of nutrition

enter the journal’s abbreviated name, e.g., j nutr

enter the ISSN, e.g., 0022-3166retrieval will be limited to the specified journallinks to full text if articles are available on the

Web

Journal Title + Subject

j nutr obesity therapy

Subject 1 and Check Tag

Advanced Search Options

Click on Advanced Search from the Homepage sidebar

Field specific searches (use Search Field pull-down menu)

continue to Add Terms to Query boxterms are ANDed together search statement is displayed at the top of the

screen with the number of citations (if any)

Lists of MeSH Terms

select Mode | List Terms select the term/s you want by

highlighting and clicking on Selectscroll up and down the alphabetic

displaymodify the query as desired

Subheadings

are used with MeSH to arrive at a more specific aspect of a subject

examples include: /epidemiology, /trends, /complications, /diagnosis (and so on

look at the handout for subheadingsenter the term/subheading; e.g.,

asthma/drug therapy

Boolean Searches

construct your search using the Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT

AND - (reduces the number of hits) includes only those citations which contain ALL the specified terms

OR - (expands the number of hits) citations which contain the terms

Boolean Searches, continued...

NOT - (limits) excludes those citationsRANGE - (limits) ranges the specified term

(e.g., publication date)

Boolean operators must be entered in UPPERCASE

Truncating Terms

Called wild card searching

use an asterisk *

use when you want to use singular or plural, or when you have a word which might have several endings

Other Boolean Information

Boolean search statements are processed left to right

sample search:

((neoplasms/etiology [majr] AND sexually transmitted diseases {majr]) NOT hiv infections [mh]) AND english [la] AND 1994:1993 [dp]

Graphic of Clinical Searches Screen

Clinical Searches

for clinicianshas built-in search “filters”four study categories - therapy, diagnosis,

etiology, prognosis are providedincrease sensitivity (most relevant articles

with some less relevant ones) or specificity (includes most relevant articles but does omit a few)

Clinical Searches, continued…

select Clinical Queries from the PubMed Homepage sidebar

type in your subject and select the study Category and Emphasis | Search

do not use this search method if you wish to retrieve everything

this filter is designed to report research conducted with specific methodologies

retrieval is limited!!!!

Citation Matchermatch a list of citations to PubMed entries

using journal, volume, issue, page number, and year

select Journal Browser from the PubMed Homepage sidebar

then select Citation Matcher on the Journal Browser sidebar

use to locate a single article by selecting Citation Matcher for Single Articles

Retrieving Citations

if you click or Search (or Enter) in Basic Mode, or if you select: Retrieve # of Documents (Advanced Mode) the search will be run

citations are displayed in batches of 20 citations appear on a document

summary page

Retrieving Citations

to print or save a larger number of citations, click on the Docs Per Page pull-down menu and select a number larger than your total retrieval

then select Searchthis redoes the search and re-displays

all the citations

To Display and Print or Save Citations

to view citations, or to print or save them, you must first display the citations

click on the Display buttonclick on the check box to the left of each

item to select themno selectons = display all citations

Display Formats

Abstract report is the default: Journal Citation, Title, Authors, Address or Affiliation, and Abstract

MEDLINE report: two-character tagged field use for importing into bibliographic

management software!!!!!

Formats, continued...

Citation report: Journal Citation, Title, Authors, Address or Affiliation, Abstract, MeSH terms, chemical substances, MEDLINE and PubMed unique identifiers

ASN.1 report: A structured format for the full records, in which each data element is explicitly represented

Printing

File | Print or Print iconto save the items to a file, you must first

go to the bottom of the page and select your computer (e.g. UNIX, Mac, PC, select the desired file format (text or HTML), then Save

use text for saving to citation managers such as ProCite or EndNote

Print Warning

the number of citations per page is set at 20 (the default)

if you want to print more than 20 citations at a time, click on the Docs Per Page pull-down menu and select some number greater than the number of citations you found and click Search.

you wil then be able to rerun your search and Save or Print from your browser

Saving

scroll to bottom and specify the kind of computer you are using: Mac, PC, UNIX

select format (text or HTML) from the pull-down menus

click on Save, select the subdirectory and give the file a name: filename.txt

save as Text if you want to save to citation management software

Printing into a Citation Manager

to change the display format, select the Display pull-down menu at the top of the document summary page

to import records into a citation manager, select Medline Report

Printing or Saving Citations

display all the items, click on the check boxes to the left of the citations and then click on the Display button

Specialized Tips for Finding Citations

verifying a citation when all you have is the volume and pages

use the Citation Matcher type in what you have

MeSH Browser

displays MeSH terms in a hierarchical structure

lets users select terms for searchingsearcher can attach subheadings

directly and limit terms to a Main Concept

Stop Words

these words do not get processed when you search

so don’t bother to type them inexamples: a, about, many, meanwhile,

myself, sufficiently, where, yet, you

Other Points of Interest

some shortcomings with the Related Articles algorithm

those articles "related" to an article without an abstract seem to generally also not have abstracts

updates and changes to the PubMed program are noted at:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/news.html

Where to Get Help

The NLM PubMed Project. PubMed Overview http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/overvi

ew.html

PubMed Help http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/pubm

edhelp.html

Interesting Search

Rural AND obstetrics AND access AND outcomes

what do you get when you type this search in?

what does clicking on Related Articles get you?