Research Guides: *Evidence-Based Medicine Resources: Searching in PubMed

Why Search PubMed?

PubMed is the free interface for the premier biomedical database, MEDLINE. It was created & is maintained by the National Library of Medicine and contains both primary & secondary literature.

Articles in PubMed are indexed by MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), terms that have specific definitions within the database & help you to create more focused searches.

PubMed (MCPHS link)
PubMed includes Medline. You do not need to search both PubMed and Medline (via Ovid).
Provided by the National Library of Medicine, this free database includes access to Medline, citations to other life sciences journals not indexed in Medline (primarily general sciences and chemistry), and links to the molecular biology databases maintained by National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Read free articles. Use Get Full Text (MCPHS) for articles that are not free.
Medline (via Ovid)
PubMed includes Medline. You do not need to search both PubMed and Medline (via Ovid).
Bibliographic database of over 21 million citations to the literature of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, allied health, pre-clinical sciences, biomedicine, and health care; International in scope; Abstracts included in 75% of the records; (mid 1960's+) Hint: Search both Embase and Medline to improve drug topic results. No additional username or password needed unless you want to save a search! Also available through PubMed.

PubMed Tutorials

These are tutorials created by the National Library Medicine to help you get the most out of PubMed.

What is in PubMed? (5 minutes)
Learn what you can find in PubMed, and how it got there.
PubMed: Find articles on a topic (1 minute)
A brief tutorial on how to find articles on a topic in PubMed.
PubMed: Save searches and set email alerts (3 minutes)
A brief tutorial on how to get alerts for articles on a topic using PubMed.
Using PubMed in Evidence-Based Practice
An interactive short course that will show you how to use evidence-based practice when searching clinical questions using PubMed.