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PubMed

A guide to PubMed, an open-access database for health and biomedical research.

PubMed

PubMed is a freely accessible citation-level database of biomedical literature.PubMed logo

It is a product of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubMed is built on the NLM's long history of indexing and providing researchers access to the nation's biomedical literature. 

 

Full Text if Open, Citation if Not

PubMed itself does not contain the full text of an article, but in most cases each article will include a link to the full text, either in PubMed Central or on the publisher's website if the article publisher has an embargo (a period of time before an item becomes available).

If an article citation includes an abstract but not the full text, look for the article title in the Library search bar or search for the journal in the Journal Finder to see if Stevens subscribes to it.

What's In It

The database was created in 1996 and now contains more than 36 million references, primarily from the following components:

  1. MEDLINE
    The National Library of Medicine's original journal citation database, going back to the 1960s and including millions of citations to articles from 1946-present. A journal's inclusion in MEDLINE is based on stringent standards to guarantee quality and relevance to the fields of biomed and life sciences. All MEDLINE entries are indexed using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) taxonomy.
  2. PubMed Central (PMC)
    Since 2000, PMC has been a free archive for full-text articles that comply with the National Institute of Health's Public Access Policy, which was made a requirement for research funded by the NIH in 2008. To meet this requirement, authors or publishers must deposit some version of the final publication in PMC. Some journal publishers retain copyright on the work and make it publicly available only after an embargo period of some kind. There is some overlap between PMC and MEDLINE in that journals that are indexed in MEDLINE are also among those who deposit articles in PMC.
  3. NCBI Bookshelf
    Full text books and documents in life sciences and healthcare from the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

PubMed Guides and Tutorials

BASICS
EVERYTHING 

Create a My NCBI Account

There is so much to use in PubMed that creating an account can help you keep track of it all. Log into My NCBI through Stevens (find it on the list of partner organizations) or use another third party vendor. You can also link multiple accounts to your My NCBI profile.

PubMed logoPubMed: Searching & Finding

 

Search Strategies: Not Always Necessary

PubMed's search functionalities are so strong because the database automatically incorporates the search strategies we typically recommend (such as those on the Search Better guide).

PubMed's algorithm understands a lot from a basic keyword search, and can also extrapolate citation information from an author name, article title, or journal title.

To see how PubMed has conducted the searches from your keywords, look for the Search History in the Advanced Search link.

 
MORE INFORMATION

PubMed + Library Databases = Full Text

If you can't find full-text of an article through PubMed, you might be able to find it through Library database subscriptions.

  1. Take the full title of an article from PubMed and put it in the Library search bar on the Library homepage, in quotation marks to search for the exact title.
  2. The catalog will show if we have full text through another database or not.
    • If we do have access, you'll be able to read it (log into myStevens/Okta if prompted).
    • If we do not have it, click the button on the record to "Request item from Interlibrary Loan" to submit the request form for the article.