PubMed: MEDLINE® Retrieval on the World Wide Web

PubMed (pubmed.gov) is a free resource developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine® (NLM).

PubMed

PubMed provides free access to

• MEDLINE, NLM's database of citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences.
• Citations that 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.
• Citations to articles that are out-of-scope (e.g., covering plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily general science and general chemistry journals, for which the life sciences articles are indexed with MeSH for MEDLINE.
• Citations to some additional life science journals that submit full-text articles to PubMed Central® and receive a qualitative review by NLM.

• Citations for the majority of books and book chapters available on the NCBI Bookshelf.

PubMed also

• Links to full-text articles found in PubMed Central or at publisher web sites, and other related resources.
• Provides Advanced search, Clinical Queries search filters, and Special Queries pages.
• Links to related articles and provides discovery tools for other data that may be of interest.
• Includes automatic e-mailing of search updates, the ability to save records, and filters for search results using "My NCBI".
• Includes a spell checker feature.
• Links to NCBI molecular biology resources.
• Adds citations daily.

PubMed is Easy to Use

Simply enter your search topics - one or more terms - and click Search. PubMed can be searched using MeSH terms, author names, title words, text words or phrases, journal names, or any combination of these. Retrieved citations are displayed and their associated abstracts can be selected for viewing. A unique feature of PubMed is the ability to instantly find related articles for any citation.

Advanced search features and filters are also available. A special clinical queries page provides customized searches for studies based on etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment of a particular disease. Systematic reviews of a topic and medical genetics can also be searched here. Search results can be viewed or downloaded in various formats, including a format suitable for bibliographic management software.

PubMed's LinkOut feature provides access to a wide variety of relevant web-accessible online resources, including full-text publications, biological databases, consumer health information, research tools, and more. More than 60 percent of PubMed records are linked to the full text on publishers' web sites or in PMC (PubMed Central). More than 90 percent of the records from the past 10 years are linked to full text. Users may have to register, or there may be a fee or subscription required to access the full text.

Publisher Participation

Publishers whose journals are indexed in MEDLINE must submit citation and abstract data electronically for inclusion in PubMed. Electronic submissions ensure that citations and abstracts are available to the public more rapidly, assignment of MeSH terms will take place more quickly, and each citation can display a link to the publisher's web site for access to full-text. Publishers are also encouraged to submit full text for inclusion in PubMed Central.