How to Search in PubMed: Records

This feature is used to modify the display settings of the results page. You can change the number of items per page, for instance, or you can change the standard Summary format to the Abstract format. The latter is useful if you want to determine the relevance of articles based on their content.

Every record in PubMed has a unique number, the PMID (PubMed Identifier).

The PMID helps you find a specific article quickly.

An NCBI account (National Center for Biotechnology Information) allows you to:

• save a search strategy so that you can continue working on it later
• set up an e-mail alert for a search strategy, keeping you up to date with new articles in your research field.

To create an account, go to Sign in to NCBI. Watch this clip NCBI to see what you can do with a My NCBI account.

With Send to, search results can be:

• saved to the Clipboard
• saved in Collections (requires a My NCBI account)
• e-mailed
• exported to reference managers such as RefWorks (see: Tips & Tricks tab)

Once an article has been indexed, the Abstract Format displays the MeSH terms that were assigned to it. It also shows which MeSH terms occur more frequently in the article. These Major Topics are marked with an *.

The / indicates that the article covers a particular aspect (subheading) of a MeSH term.

An article in PubMed can have various statuses (as can be seen in the Abstract format):

• as supplied by publisher - article has been supplied directly by the publisher;  no MeSH terms assigned (yet)
• in process - MeSH terms are still to be assigned
• indexed for MEDLINE - MeSH terms will not be assigned to this article;  (e.g. if the article is hard to assign to one specific field)

You can supplement MeSH term searches with searching by word or phrase (such as [tiab]) to find articles with a status other than PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE.

PubMed automatically sorts articles by date. The most recent articles are at the top and have the status PubMed - as supplied by publisher or PubMed - in process.