ANTH 190: From Ayahuasca to Zoloft: anthropological approaches to drugs and drug use: PubMed Basics

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.

Below is an image of a PubMed article record. Labels were added to explain the information that PubMed provides about the article:

• Journal Name Abbreviation
• Publication Date
• Volume/Issue#, pages 
• Article title
• Author last name with first and middle initials
• Author affiliation
• Abstract
• Links to comments 
• Links to assigned index terms.

Remember: PubMed does NOT include the full-text of articles in its database--it links out to them. PubMed only searches the information about the article(including title and abstract), not the full-text of the article.  

SAMPLE ABSTRACT FROM PUBMED