For many searches, it is not necessary to use special tags or syntax. PubMed uses multiple tools to help you find relevant results.
- Identify the key concepts for your search.
- Enter the terms (or key concepts) in the search box.
- Press the Enter key or click Search.
There are 3 ways to save search results:
- Citations can be saved temporarily to the Clipboard. The Clipboard holds up to 500 items from one or more searches. Items saved to the Clipboard expire after 8 hours of inactivity.
- Save citations indefinitely using My NCBI Collections. Collections can be made public to share with others. To save results, you must be logged into your My NCBI account Read more about Collections.
- Citations can also be saved as a text file (.txt). Read more about saving as a text file.
The Best Match sort order is based on an algorithm that analyzes 150 signals that are helpful for finding best matching results in each PubMed citation found with your search terms.
There are 5 sort order options:
- Best Match
- Most Recent
- Publication Date
- First Author
- Journal
As of February 2023, searchers can identify how PubMed citations were indexed by appending one of these 3 search strings on the right to their search.
- Automated: indexingmethod_automated
- Curated: indexingmethod_curated
- Fully human indexed: medline[sb] NOT (indexingmethod_curated OR indexingmethod_automated
Learn more about the 3 indexing methods used for newly added citations.
There are several ways to search for a specific author. You may need to use more than one strategy to find all citations by the author you are searching for.
NLM suggests that you enter the author’s last name and initials without punctuation in the search box and click Search.
A list of journals included in PubMed is available by FTP.
Enter one of the following in the search box:
- full journal title (e.g., molecular biology of the cell)
- MEDLINE title abbreviation (e.g., mol biol cell)
- ISSN number, a standardized international code (e.g., 1059-1524)
You can search for a term in a specific field by including a search field tag after the term.
For example, UCLA [ad] will search for the term “UCLA” in the affiliation field only.
The MEDLINE/PubMed Data Element table describes the major fields for PubMed MEDLINE records.
- Not all fields will appear in every record.
Only some of the elements on the field list are searchable fields in PubMed.
Sometimes a search yields too many results.
To limit the number of search results:
- Replace general search terms with more specific ones (e.g., low back pain instead of back pain).
- Include additional terms in your query.
- Use the sidebar filters to restrict results by publication date, full text availability, article type, and more.
You may receive too few results for a number of reasons (new concept, restricted to MeSH, filters applied, etc.).
- Remove extraneous or specific terms from the search box.
- Try using alternative terms to describe the concepts you are searching for.
On the abstract page for a citation, see the Similar Articles section for a pre-calculated set of additional PubMed citations closely related to that article.
You can use filters to narrow your search results by article type, text availability, publication date, species, article language, sex, age, and other.
Read more about how to filter by:
To apply a filter:
- Run a search in PubMed.
- Click the filter you would like to activate from the left-hand sidebar. A check mark will appear next to the activated filter(s).
Subsequent searches will be filtered until the selected filters are turned off, or until your browser data is cleared.
PubMed provides several different methods to adjust the date to meet your search criteria.
You can use proximity searching to search for multiple terms appearing in any order within a specified distance of one another in the [Title], [Title/Abstract], or [Affiliation] fields.
To create a proximity search in PubMed, enter your terms using the following format:
"search terms"[field:~N]
- Results will include your quoted terms in any order.
- Automatic Term Mapping is not applied to the quoted terms.
- Proximity searching is not compatible with wildcards (*).
- You can combine proximity searches with other terms using Boolean operators; for example, "hip pain"[Title:~4] AND stretching
- Booleans and stopwords included in quoted terms for proximity search are searched like regular keywords.
You can search by type of empirical method used.
- The Study Characteristics [PT] field describes the type of empirical method used in the study.
- You can view the full MeSH hierarchy for this branch.
- You can find a complete list of Publication Types in PubMed Help
This strategy is intended to retrieve citations to systematic reviews in PubMed and encompasses citations assigned the "Systematic Review" publication type during MEDLINE indexing; citations that have not yet completed MEDLINE indexing; and non-MEDLINE citations.
Example: exercise hypertension AND systematic [sb]
The Browser is an alternative search interface for MeSH vocabulary that allows users to search directly for MeSH terms and conduct text word searches of various fields of the records.
- There’s a browser for the current year MeSH vocabulary and one previous year.
- The files are updated each week day Monday-Friday by 8AM EST.
This tool assists with term generation and can automatically identify relevant MeSH terms from text that is input by the user.
MeSH on Demand suggested MeSH vocabulary is machine-generated by NLM’s Medical Text Identifier (MTI) and DOES NOT reflect any human review. MTI may recommend MeSH Terms not explicitly found in the text.
Read more about MeSH on Demand.
Associated data links are included on the abstract page of a citation and can be found quickly via the navigation links on the right side of the page. The Associated data section only appears for citations with one or more of these data.
- Users can find citations with associated data by searching for data[filter] or by applying the associated data filter from the left side bar to their search results.
- To find citations in PubMed that link back to clinical trials, use the following format to search in PubMed: clinicaltrials.gov[si] Vertigo
Your PubMed search history appears on the Advanced Search page under History.
To download, go to the Advanced page, click Download to generate a CSV file of current History items.
Please note, Microsoft Excel is typically unable to display or print more than a maximum of 1024 characters in a cell; therefore, you may want to open the CSV file with a text editor to display your complete list of searches.
Citations can be exported into citation management software.
Use Send to: Citation Manager to export citations as an .nbib file that can be used by many citation management programs.
Email yourself or your collaborators citations or get a permalink to bookmark or share your search results.
- Use the check boxes to select citations from your search results or Clipboard. You may move to other pages and continue your selections. You may also choose to email all citations shown on the page without making any selections. From the PubMed Results Page, select Email. Read more about emailing citations.
- Your citations will be sent from the NCBI automatic mail server with the sender's email address [nobody@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]. Do not reply to this message, as this is not a functioning customer service email address and is not monitored.
Obtain a permalink/URL to bookmark or share your search. A permalink is a permanent link that will constantly direct you to an article or an online resource.
- To get the URL for an individual citation, copy the permalink for the citation under "Share."
- To get the URL for your search results, copy the URL from your web browser's address bar or bookmark the URL using your web browser's bookmark function.
- Create a URL manually
Use the print function of your web browser.
To print citations from different searches, save the citations to PubMed’s Clipboard, and then print.
Citing sources is important because it gives credit to the people whose ideas or words are being used. Citations can also make work more credible.
The Cite button makes it easy to retrieve styled citations that you can copy and paste into a document or download as an .nbib file to use with your reference manager software. Capitalization of article titles and other citation elements should be checked for compliance with a particular reference style when required.