Stopwords

PubMed also refers to a list of commonly found words that are referred to as "stopwords." Stopwords are words that, if indexed, could potentially return every document in the database if the word was used in a search statement.

Consequently, commonly found words are not indexed and PubMed will ignore them.

Go to PubMed's Help to view the list of stopwords.

You should now understand how PubMed takes your query, translates it, and retrieves citations to articles. In the next topic, we'll look at developing search strategies. Click Next when you are ready to continue.