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Search for articles in PubMed

PubMed Logo The freely available literature database PubMed is the world´s largest medical database. It indexes around 5500 international biomedical journals. The search language is English.

The Library offers a special access-URL for PubMed. It enables a filtered display of the search results (e.g. Review, Clinical Trial, German) and the "Check full text" service.

"Check full text"-service

If you access PubMed within the faculty network via the Library´s website you can use our "Check full text"-service to access or order full texts.

What can I do if the "check full text"-button is not displayed after a search in PubMed?

The button is only displayed if you access PubMed via a special URL - either via our homepage or directly via http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?myncbishare=medizin_mannheim (Do not use www.pubmed.gov!)

Search options

PubMed Help: explains how to search PubMed and offers short videos on research strategies.
Filter sidebar: the filter sidebar on the left side of the result list can be used to narrow down the search results by publication date, type of article, languages, ages etc.
Clinical Queries and Topic-Specific Queries: Allow the search in a defined subset of PubMed, which is constrained to clinical trials or certain subjects.
Note: You can not find the journal you are looking for?
Search the journal title in the National Library of Medicine´s Catalogue. If you do not get any results, the journal is not indexed. If there are results you can check the Current Indexing Status, which will tell you whether the journal is indexed for MEDLINE or not. The literature database MedPilot is a good alternative for German-language journals.
Too many results?
Narrow your search by using the Advanced Search or the Limits. For thematical searching see the next section.

Thematic search with MeSH

For a thematic search you can use English keywords (Medical Subject Headings). The advantage of using MeSH-Terms is that search results are often more relevant because concepts are searched within their thematic surroundings.
You can access the MeSH Database on the PubMed home page. The PubMed Online Training includes a tutorial and related Quick Tour videos on MeSH.
Hints for an effective thematic search

1. Find relevant keywords (MeSH-Terms)

Search for a relevant article for your subject.
Check if it has already been indexed for Medline. You can recognize this if you look at the status besides the PubMed ID: [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
If this is the case, take a look at the keywords of the article: Click on the title --> click on + near Publication Types, MeSH-Terms. There you can find a list of relevant keywords that will help you go on with your search.

2. Check if a systematic review is available

On the PubMed homepage click on PubMed Tools and Clinical Queries.
After entering relevant search terms you will find a list of Systematic Reviews in the second column.
Alternatively you can enter your search terms into PubMed´s main search fild and add "AND systematic[sb]". E.g. "lyme disease AND systematic[sb]".

MyNCBI account

MyNCBI is a free account which is connected to PubMed. You can publish your own bibliography or activate email alerts. After doing so you are informed on a regular basis about every new entry to PubMed that matches your saved search request.

Detailed information on using MyNCBI is available at MyNCBI Help.

PubMed Health service

The new online service PubMed Health focuses on clinical effectiveness of health care interventions.The most important resource for this purpose are systematic reviews, which assess the quality and summarise the results of clinical trials.

Aim and target group
The aim of the online service is the consolidation of systematic reviews of various organisations and further EBM-resources under one search interface. It provides summaries of systematic reviews, HTA-assessments and guidelines. A medical encyclopedia and medication information complete the online service.
PubMed Health is designed for patients as well as health care personnel. Hence it can it is not clearly set off against Clinical Queries (target group: doctors) and Medline Plus (target group: patients).

Further information

see PubMed Health Help and About
a comparable service from the United Kingdom is NHS Evidence

Alternative PubMed tools

On the Internet you can find many tools that are based on the PubMed database. They visualize your search results or deliver statistical analysis of your search. Some choices:

GoPubMed is an ontology-based semantical search tool. Search results are visualized by authors, countries, publication data, etc. You can refine your search by using clustered MeSH-terms.
PubReMiner provides statistical analyses of your search results. It analyzes publication date, journals, authors and MeSH term and orders them by frequency.
PubFocus performs statistical analyses of Medline results based on journal rank and citation information to provide a list of articles ranked by relevancy. It also uses citation information to determine the author rankings and most prolific authors.
Kfinder uses your abstract text to suggest keywords and MeSH headings as well as authors that have written papers with those subject terms.