PubMed

Information about PubMed

PubMed is provided by the United States National Library of Medicine.

PubMed is a free search engine offering access to the MEDLINE database of citations and abstracts of biomedical research articles. The core subject is medicine, and PubMed covers fields related to medicine, such as nursing and other allied health disciplines. It also provides very full coverage of the related biomedical sciences, such as biochemistry and cell biology. It is offered by the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health as part of the Entrez information retrieval system. As with other indexes, the inclusion of an article in PubMed does not endorse that article's contents. MEDLINE covers over 5,000 journals published in the United States and more than 80 other countries primarily from 1950 to the present. In addition to MEDLINE, PubMed also offers access to

OLDMEDLINE for pre-1966 citations. This has recently been enhanced, and records for 1951+, even those parts in the printed indexes, are now included within the main portion.
Citations to all articles, even those that are out-of-scope (e.g., covering plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily the most important general science and chemistry journals, from which the life sciences articles are indexed for MEDLINE.
In-process citations which provide a record for an article before it is indexed with MeSH and added to MEDLINE or converted to out-of-scope status.
Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing (when supplied electronically by the publisher).
Some life science journals that submit full text to PubMed Central and may not have been recommended for inclusion in MEDLINE although they have undergone a review by NLM, and some physics journals that were part of a prototype PubMed in the early to mid-1990s.http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/pubmed.html

Many PubMed citations contain links to full text articles which are freely available, often in the PubMed Central digital library.

PubMed is one of a number of search engines through which it is possible to search the MEDLINE database; the National Library of Medicine also leases the MEDLINE information to a number of private vendors such as Ovid and SilverPlatter--as well as many other vendors. PubMed has been available free on the Internet since the mid-1990s.

Information about the journals indexed in PubMed is found in its Journals Database, searchable by subject or journal title, Title Abbreviation, the NLM ID (NLM's unique journal identifier), the ISO abbreviation, and both the print and electronic International Standard Serial Numbers (pISSN and eISSN). The database includes all journals in all Entrez databases. PubMed has over 14 million citations.^[1]

Searching PubMed

For comprehensive, optimal searching in PubMed, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of its core component, MEDLINE, and especially of the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) controlled vocabulary used to index MEDLINE articles.

Telegram-Style Search

However, simple telegram-style search formulations can also be used; they produce very acceptable results^[2]. PubMed automatically links textwords to relevant MeSH terms. Aspects of the question can then be added successively, in a Google-like fashion, until a number of ‘hits’ judged manageable is achieved. No knowledge of actual MeSH terms, Boolean operators, English or American spelling, ‘nesting’, or record-fields is required. PubMed’s intelligent search algorithm does (or implies) this in the background. Examples of such telegram-style questions and results they produce on PubMed:

Question 1: Optimal management of radial head fractures? Randomized controlled trials?

Telegram-style question in PubMed search window: radial head fractures randomized

Result: 9 records found, one^[3] judged highly relevant

Question 2: Paper by Glasziou on radial fractures in the BMJ in 2007?

Telegram-style question in PubMed search window: glasziou fractures bmj 2007

Result: 1 record (the target) found^[4]

Question 3: State of vitreous body (of the eye) and time of death? A review, perhaps?

Telegram-style question in PubMed search window: vitreous body time death review

Result: 7 records found, several relevant, e.g.^[5]

Searching with Tags and Booleans

Booleans

The Boolean operators are AND (intersection), OR (union), or NOT (exclusion). NOT should be used with care as it may generate 'false-negative' results.

When no operator is used in a search formulation AND is assumed.

For example:

pnas [ta] drexler ke [au] 1981 [dp]

will yield a single reference, and is the equivalent of

pnas [ta] AND drexler ke [au] AND 1981 [dp]

whereas

pnas [ta] OR drexler ke [au] OR 1981 [dp]

will yield hundreds of thousands of articles, including all article published in 1981, all articles in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and all articles by K.E. Drexler.

Alternative interfaces

GoPubMed - Explore PubMed/MEDLINE with Gene Ontology
MeshPubMed - Explore PubMed/MEDLINE with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
HubMed - An alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database.
eTBLAST - a natural language text similarity engine for MEDLINE and other text databases.
PubMedTool - an alternative interface to the PubMed, with clear interface and clipboards
FABLE - a gene-centric text-mining search engine for MEDLINE
HighWire Press - a medical search engine similar to PubMed in function and purpose but with some notable differences.
BIOWIZARD - a Digg-style site for PubMed/MEDLINE with search functionality through Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
ESRNexus- free searchable database of medical and societal references including human-extracted summary data. The ESRNexus is maintained by the research community. References from a broad spectrum of sources including gray literature, independent databases and PubMed/Medline.
Authoratory - contact info, interests, social connections and funding of thousands of leading scientists from PubMed/MEDLINE
CiteMD - Explore PubMed/MEDLINE, create a free account and organize your references into projects, export to spreadsheet and word processor and email medical citations.
PubMed Reader - A free web-based alternative interface for PubMed search
Unbound MEDLINE - Clinician-friendly access to PubMed searcing via PDA, wireless devices and the Web

References

1. ^ Literature Databases, PubMed (accessed 2007-05-03).
2. ^ Clarke J, Wentz R. Pragmatic approach is effective in evidence based health care. BMJ. 2000 Sep 2;321(7260):566-7
3. ^ Liow RY et al. Early mobilisation for minimally displaced radial head fractures is desirable. A prospective randomised study of two protocols. Injury. 2002 Nov;33(9):801-6
4. ^ Glasziou P. Do all fractures need full immobilisation? BMJ. 2007;335(7620):612-3
5. ^ Madea B, RÃ¶dig A. Time of death dependent criteria in vitreous humor: accuracy of estimating the time since death. Forensic Sci Int. 2006;164(2-3):87-92.

External links

MEDLINE/PubMed
PubMed Online Tutorials
PubMed Help
PubCrawler, an alert service which runs scheduled custom queries
PubMed Reader - A free web-based research program for displaying customized PubMed search results

MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is an international literature database of life sciences and biomedical information. It covers the fields of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care.
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bibliographic or library database is a database of bibliographic information. It may be a database containing information about books and other materials held in a library (e.g.
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Nursing is a profession focused on assisting individuals, families, and communities in attaining, maintaining, and recovering optimal health and functioning. Modern definitions of nursing define it as a science and an art that focuses on promoting quality of life as defined by
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Allied health professions are clinical healthcare professions distinct from the medical and nursing. As the name implies, they are allies in a healthcare team, working together to make the healthcare system function.
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Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes in living organisms.^[1] The word "biochemistry" comes from the Greek word βιοχημεία biochēmeia, which means "the chemistry of life.
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Cell biology (also called cellular biology or formerly cytology, from the Greek kytos, "container") is an academic discipline that studies cells. This includes their physiological properties, their structure, the organelles they contain, interactions with
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The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.^[1] The collections of the National Library of Medicine include more than seven million books, journals, technical
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National Institutes of Health (NIH) is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical research.
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The Entrez Global Query Cross-Database Search System is a powerful federated search engine, or web portal that allows users to search many discrete health sciences databases at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website.
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Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for information in documents, searching for documents themselves, searching for metadata which describe documents, or searching within databases, whether relational stand-alone databases or hypertextually-networked databases
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A mesh is similar to fabric or a web in that it has many connected or weaved pieces. In clothing, a mesh is often defined as a loosely woven fabric that has a large number of closely-spaced holes, frequently used for modern sports jerseys and other clothing.
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PubMed Central is a free digital database of full-text scientific literature in biomedical and life sciences. It can be reached at [1] .

It grew from the online Entrez PubMed biomedical literature search system. PubMed Central was developed by the U.S.
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A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media) and accessible by computers ^[1]. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks.
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Ovid Technologies (or just Ovid) is part of the Wolters Kluwer group of companies. It provides access to online bibliographic databases, journals and other products, chiefly in the area of health sciences.
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SilverPlatter Information, Inc. was one of the first companies to produce commercial CD-ROMs. It was founded in 1984 by Bela Hatvany and Walt Winshall with the explicit intention of using CD technology to publish data.
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International Organization for Standardization (Organisation internationale de normalisation), widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations.
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An ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, is a unique eight-digit number used to identify a print or electronic periodical publication. The ISSN system was adopted as international standard ISO 3297 in 1975. The TC 46/SC 9 is responsible for the standard.
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Text sometimes exhibits case sensitivity, that is, words can differ in meaning based on the differing use of uppercase and lowercase letters. Words with capital letters don't always have the same meaning as words with lowercase letters.
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GoPubMed is a knowledge-based search engine for biomedical texts. The Gene Ontology serves as "Table of contents" in order to structure the 16 million articles of the MEDLINE data base.
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The Gene Ontology project, or GO, provides a controlled vocabulary to describe gene and gene product attributes in any organism. It can be broadly split into two parts.
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MeshPubMed is together with GoPubMed a knowledge-based search engine for biomedical texts. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) serve as "Table of contents" in order to structure the over 16 million articles of the MEDLINE data base.
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Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a huge controlled vocabulary (or metadata system) for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE/PubMed
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HubMed is an alternative, third-party interface to PubMed, the database of biomedical literature produced by the National Library of Medicine. Features include relevance-ranked search results, web feeds of query updates, direct citation export, tagging and graphical display of
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eTBLAST is a text similarity search engine currently offering access to the MEDLINE database, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) CRISP database, the Institute of Physics (IOP) database, and the NASA technical reports database.
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HighWire Press is a division of the Stanford University Libraries that produces the online versions of high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly content. Recipient of the 2003 ALPSP Award for "Service to Not-for-Profit Publishing", HighWire partners with influential
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Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment.
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PMID is an acronym for PubMed Identifier or more specifically PubMed Unique Identifier which is a unique number assigned to each PubMed citation of life sciences and biomedical scientific journal articles.
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