Finding Health Information: A Path Through the Maze: 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 21 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.)

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

Always access PubMed through a UNC Chapel Hill Libraries web page so that you will see the Find @ UNC button. You can access PubMed from the HSL home page and from many of HSL's guides. Or, go through the UNC Libraries E-Research by Discipline 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.

PRO TIP: Always connect to PubMed from UNC Library websites so you will see the Find @ UNC button. 

When you retrieve more than one article, the Find @ UNC button does not appear in PubMed's default display.

To see more information about an individual article:

• Click on the article title link to see an individual article's citation page.

• The Find @ UNC button is in the upper right-side of the screen when you view an individual article's abstract.

To see more information about all the articles

• Use the Summary drop down to change the Format to Abstract for all the articles in the results set. The Find @ UNC button will be at the bottom of each abstract.

Use the Find @ UNC button to go to the online article. When you are off-campus you will be prompted to enter your Onyen / Password the first time you go to a full-text article.

When the article is not online via Find @ UNC, a page with other ways to get the article is displayed.

• look for print in the UNC Libraries' catalog
• check for free access with Google Scholar or the Google Scholar Button browser add-in (available for Chrome or Firefox)
• request from another library via Interlibrary Loan
• ask us for help

It is always worth trying a quick Google search to see if the article is freely available. Find @ UNC is not able to point to all of those and we are consistently surprised  by what we find freely available online.

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 the Journals in NCBI Databases link under More Resources on the PubMed homepage.

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

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 under PubMed tools on the homepage and enter the citation into 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.