PubMed

Below is a video about PubMed Basics, Filters, Narrowing and Managing Results. To access the video, you will need to log into your MyUTampa account. 

PubMed uses a controlled vocabulary, known as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) for searching, but you do not have to use MeSH to find articles on PubMed. In addition to the information below, you can also use the PubMed User Guide for help with searching PubMed. 

State your topic or question? Make sure to use specific terms.

Example: Does diet or exercise work better for combating childhood obesity? 

Identify the key words in your question:

• Childhood
• Diet
• Exercise
• Obesity

Type the key words into the search box:

Child* AND diet AND excercise AND obesity

Notes on search phrase: 

1. Including terms: When searching for multiple terms use "AND" between the terms. This tells PubMed to look for the two terms together.
2. Excluding terms: If you do not want to see items on exercise, then you want to exclude this term in the search. Your search string would be: child* AND diet AND obesity NOT exercise. Using "NOT" will tell PubMed to exclude this term. Please be cautious as this can also exclude some relevant articles on the topic if the article uses exercise anywhere in the title, abstract, or is in the subject headings. 
3. Searching for phrases: If you want to search for a specific phrase use quotation marks. Example: "Childhood Obesity" AND Exercise. This would make sure the terms Childhood and Obesity show up next to each other. Note, if you use quotation marks, PubMed automatic searching will not work. This means it will not automatically map to other terms. 
4. PubMed searches the keywords in the title, abstract and subject headings. Please note, PubMed does not include full-text articles and does not search the full-text of articles. 
5. Wildcards: You will notice in the example search used the asterisk * wildcard. This is so the search results would return child, children, or childhood. This creates a wildcard search to substitute for 0 or more characters in a term or phrase. Another example per the PubMed User Guide: vaccin* schedul* will find results that include "vaccine schedule", "vaccine scheduling", "vaccination schedules", and more variations of this phrase.  Please note using wildcards turns off the automatic MeSH term mapping. So if you type in hear* attack, it will not link to the MeSH term "Myocardial Infarction" and you may miss out on several helpful articles. 

Results:

The results will show up in PubMed with the most relevant articles, according to PubMed, at the top. You can then click on the title of the article for more information, or you can further refine your search by using filters. 

For more tutorials and information on basic searching, see the PubMed Online Training tutorials.