Using PubMed

What is PubMed?

The PubMed database was developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It provides free access to MEDLINE, NLM's database of more than 12 million bibliographic citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences.

Note: PubMed also includes access to additional selected life sciences journals not in MEDLINE, and links to the full-text of articles at participating publishers' Web sites and the molecular biology databases maintained by NCBI. (This module considers only the MEDLINE resources in PubMed.)

Getting Started with PubMed

In our case studies, Cheryl is researching exercise therapy for the treatment of diabetes. At this point she needs peer-reviewed journal articles on this topic. PubMed is an excellent place for her to search.

Accessing PubMed

To enable full text searching, access PubMed through a UNC Chapel Hill Web page. You can access PubMed from the HSL home page. Or, go through the UNC Libraries E-Research Tools page.

Basic Searching

You can search for articles by using keywords or combining keywords through Boolean style searching. PubMed looks for words in the record as well as for MeSH (Medical Subject) subject headings [more about MeSH].

To run a simple search, enter keywords into the search box, connected with AND, OR, or NOT (ALL CAPS!) as appropriate. For example, Cheryl is looking for articles about diabetes and exercise and teenagers, so she will type diabetes AND exercise AND teenagers in the search box.

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Finding Full Text

If you access PubMed through a UNC-Chapel Hill website, you can check whether an article is available by clicking the Find @ UNC logo.

To see the logo, you must change the display to Abstract by selecting Abstract from the drop-down menu.

Scroll through the articles until you find an article that interests you and click on the Find @ UNC Logo logo. If the article is available full-text in one of UNC-Chapel Hill's e-journals, you will see links to the article and journal. Click on 'Article' to go to the full-text article. If the article is not available online, click on the 'Search for this item in print' link to search the UNC catalog for that journal.

Note: You may see other buttons linking to full text on the PubMed page. Often times there will take you to the journal's webpage, where you may be asked to pay for the article. Click Find @ UNC on the PubMed page instead to search UNC-Chapel Hill's journals.

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Using the Journals Database

Many journals indexed by PubMed are held by UNC Libraries. To check for a title not available in full text through PubMed, look it up in the catalog.

For example, Cheryl found a citation to an article in 'Coron Artery Dis.' Now she needs to know the full title so she can look for the journal in the library catalog. First she clicks on Journals Database in the navigation bar.

Then she types the abbreviation Coron Artery Dis in the search box and clicks Go. The full title is Coronary Artery Disease.

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Verifying Citations

Sometimes you may only have part of a citation. The citation matcher helps you find the full citation.

If you only know part of the citation, click on Single Citation Matcher on the left navigation bar and enter it on the form provided by the Single Citation Matcher to find the full citation. This may yield no results, but entering what you have will produce a list of citations that can be matched to your information need.

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PubMed Unique Identifiers (PMID)

Once an article is entered into PubMed, it is assigned a unique identification number (PMID). You may never need this number, but you can use it to request an interlibrary loan. The PMID number appears below the citation.

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