Using the new PubMed

PubMed is a free database that has more than 30 million abstracts (summaries) of biological/medical and life sciences research, from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books, and is located in NIH.  Sometimes there are links to the full-text research as well, not just the abstracts.

Why would you want to use PubMed instead of Google (or even Google Scholar)?  Because much of this research isn't available on Google/Google Scholar, and PubMed has terrific tools that make its use really easy and useful.

While you can search it just like you do Google, there are many additional filters that make PubMed more useful.  (And by the way, it says "Log In" but for looking up research, that's not required.)  Let's look at an example of search results to see some of PubMed's useful features:

The default sort is Best Match, that is the abstracts that best meet your search.  But if you prefer, you can change this to Most Recent, the abstracts in date order, with most recent first.  Any restrictions using the filters are highlighted in pink in the center of the page.  You can see that I've used the Article Type Review to limit abstracts to just Reviews, since Reviews are often evaluations of many related pieces of research.  Also notice that the search terms are shown in bold in the search results.

These are not all the possible filters, but seem to be frequently used - such as only "full text," or only published in the past "5 years."

If you look at an Abstract (PubMed calls these citations, but virtually all are abstracts), you can see information such as the authors - and if you click on Expand next to the authors' names, you can learn an email for correspondence, and what institutions the authors work for.

Also, you can see the full-text link, in the upper right (which will say "free" if anybody can see the article), and also the DOI number, under the authors' names - a clickable link that will occasionally take you to the full article, even if the full-text link will not.  (Each article has a unique DOI number - Digital Object Identifier - which can be handy.)

Also handy are "Similar articles," and "Citations" (other papers that cited this article).  Citations won't be that helpful for a just-published article because it is just too new to be cited yet;  but journals and others base quality measures on how often an author/ article/ journal is cited.

Now, why would the article not be available - this is called putting articles behind a paywall?  Well, publishers make money from subscriptions, and while universities and drug companies pay for subscriptions, private citizens usually don't.  But few of us want to pay $35.00 for each article we want to read in detail.  We'll talk about ways to get around this in another blog post.

Besides looking up abstracts, you can email the search results or abstracts to yourself (handy if you are working in more that one place), and even have the system send you Alerts whenever there are new articles that meet your criteria.  This requires you to Log In (see the first image).  Usually, you don't need to log in, but for Alerts you must.  One of the choices for logging in is your Google account, but this was not working when I tried it.

PubMed is added to daily, is indexed, and is free.  It's a tool I use every day.  You can, too.