michigan informatics

PubMed

Unless your search topic is very specialized, PubMed is probably the best database with which to begin your search. PubMed is a fairly comprehensive biomedical bibliographic database, covering most areas of biomedicine and health care. Created by the National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health, PubMed is freely available on the web. It includes over 15 million citations from the 1950s to the present from almost 5,000 scholarly and professional journals. It includes some links to full text journals, although few of these are free and most require a paid subscription.

Even if you have searched PubMed before, you should be certain that you fully understand the following features. Below are links to pages within PubMed's online tutorial. Be sure to click on the Next button to see all pages within each section. If you are unfamiliar with PubMed, you should take the full PubMed tutorial.

• Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
  MeSH is the controlled vocabulary used by PubMed. In order to search PubMed effectively, it is necessary to understand what MeSH is and how it works.
  
  
• Automatic Term Mapping
  When you enter keywords into the search box, PubMed automatically maps your terms to MeSH headings, journal titles, and author names. Understanding this process is vital to successful PubMed searching.
  
  
• Details
  The Details tab will appear with your search results. You should always check this tab to see how PubMed automatically mapped your terms. If you find that it has done a poor job of term mapping, you will need to either revise your search terms or search the MeSH Database directly (see below).
  
  
• Searching the MeSH Database
  When you want more control over exactly which MeSH terms and subheadings are used in your search, you can search the MeSH Database directly. This is a very powerful way to search PubMed.
  
  
• Limits
  You can add limits to your search in order to help narrow and focus your retrieval. Useful limits include age, publication type, and language.

Try the following examples to see how Medical Subject Headings and Automatic Term Mapping work in PubMed. Click on the Search PubMed button and then choose the Details Tab within PubMed to see how the terms were translated.