General information
Searching scientific literature is an important feature in scientific work. In this section we will learn how to use the PubMed database. PubMed is the most and widely used free literature searching tool for biologists and physicians. It is integrated in the database-retrieval system at the NCBI and is essentially a web interface to the Medline database which indexes more than 11 million journal abstracts. PubMed provides links to more than 1100 journals which are available on the web.
The interface allows the user to specify a search term and a search field (e.g. title, text word, journal or author). Queries retrieve abstracts from most of the major journals.
Many of the same principle applied to search engines on the web can apply to PubMed as well.
Search Operators in PubMed
- Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT can be used in PubMed
- wildcard function *. For example schizo* AND 8q* try to find publications which present evidence of schizophrenia assosiated on chromosome 8q21. Using the wildcartd schizo* instead of schizophrenia retrieves articles which mention schizoaffective, schizophrenia or schizophrenic. May be all of this search terms are relevant for an literature reviewing process.
- You can limit your search also by using special shortcuts named search tags or filter. With these filter it is possible to restrict your search to special areas of an article. For example:
- Search term: Mody 4 (search without any filter) - result: more than 13000 paper
- Search term: Mody 4 [ti] (restriction of your search just on the title of all available papers in PubMed - result: 1 paper
- PubMed database at NCBI
Extension of PubMed database
The MeSH database is a controlled vocabulary defined by the National Library of Medicine. It is used for indexing articles for the MEDLLINE/PubMed database. MeSH terminology provides a consistent way to get information that can be retrieved using different terminology for the same concepts.
Please direct questions and comments to Martin Haubrock.