On November 10, 2020, the New Jersey State Library presented PubMed Essentials. Thank you to all who attended!

PubMed is a free biomedical database from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) available to everyone. It is one of the largest biomedical databases in the world, containing more than 30 million citations. It is made up of MEDLINE, PubMed Central (PMC), and Bookshelf. Recently, COVID-19 preprints have also been added. PMC is a free full text archive. Articles in MEDLINE are indexed with MeSH headings which describe the articles and can be used for searching.

PubMed introduced a new interface in 2020. The new display has been streamlined and puts your search results in a “best match” order.

A “Tips for Using NLM’s PubMed” factsheet was provided in the class, and we discussed several ways to search for articles in PubMed.

Simple subject search

Enter your subject with no formatting or punctuation. For example: High blood pressure low salt diet

PubMed searches for your terms and also maps to specific Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH to expand your search.

Checking the Search Details found in the Advanced Search section is helpful to make sure that PubMed mapped your search terms the way you want.

Boolean search

We also saw how to search using the Boolean operators, AND, OR and NOT.

When constructing a more complicated search, you may need multiple Booleans operators. You will need to “nest” terms that are OR’d together using parentheses.

Always capitalize Boolean operators in PubMed.

Example: Common cold AND (vitamin c OR zinc)

Medical Subject Headings Search

Use the MeSH database to construct a very focused search. You can focus further by adding descriptive subheadings or setting your search term as a major concept of the article.

From the MeSH database, search for your subject and find your MeSH terms.

Add selected MeSH terms to the search box and decide on options for subheadings, narrower terms and major topic searching.

Advantages of using MeSH:

• you have the ability to construct a highly specific search
• using the MeSH terms finds synonyms for your concept
• you have the option to use subheadings and the major concept to narrow your search.

Disadvantages of using MeSH:

• you will not find the articles in PubMed that are not indexed, including some PMC full text articles
• you won’t find results from the Bookshelf
• the most recent articles may not have MeSH terms assigned yet, so you would miss these results in a search.

Finding Full Text

In this session, we used the NJ State Library special link to PubMed which is accessible to NJ state employees and TESU students and staff.

When searching through this link, you will see the Find Full Text From NJ State Library icon on every result. This will lead you to either full text or one of our databases, or a link to ILLiad, our online request system.

A free version of the PubMed database is available for everyone, and in many cases you can link out to full text. For additional full text options, please contact your local public library.

If you have any questions regarding PubMed or other health/medical resources, please contact Martha Sullivan at msullivan@njstatelib.org.  Please download a copy of the PubMed Factsheet 2020.  You can view a recording of the webinar at https://youtu.be/0IVzzJcLo-g.