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PubMed Guide

What's in this Guide?

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PubMed comprises more than 22 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

Access PubMed from the Health Sciences Library or UCF Libraries web sites to see icons showing full-text availability.

Use the tabs near the top of the page to navigate through the pages of this guide.  Tabs are available for:

  • Searching PubMed provides step-by-step instructions for running a search in PubMed, including inputting search terms, using filters to limit your search by language, ages, and other common topics, viewing your results, printing/saving/emailing your citations, and how to find the full-text of articles and order copies if needed.

  • Find Full Text lists steps to follow to get a complete journal article from a PubMed citation.
  • MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), the list of keywords or descriptors that describe articles in MEDLINE.  Use MeSH to identify search terms and to focus a search.
  • Advanced Search provides information on improving your search results by:
    • Broadening a search using MeSH and Related Articles
    • Narrowing a search using * field tags *History and the Advanced Search window and *limiting retrieval to research-based citations.  Also see hints for dealing with too many or too few citations.

  • My NCBI provides an overview on how to create and manage a myNCBI account.
  • Exporting Citations to EndNote from PubMed, Google Scholar, and other various resources.

  • Instructional Videos and tutorials found on PubMed's Online Training website.

For comprehensive PubMed help see PubMed Help or click the Help link at the top right of PubMed pages.