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If you perform a subsequent search from the same page, the filters will still apply (e.g. In the example described above, there were 22 review articles for “olfactory bulb AND (cell death OR apoptosis) NOT development”, so that might be a good place to start, especially if it’s a new topic for you.Ī note about selecting article types. You can select multiple article types using this menu as well. You can further improve your PubMed searches using the ‘Additional filters’ option, which provides a far greater selection of different article types, including various stages of clinical trial. Underneath the menu title, you can select ‘Clinical trial’, ‘Review’ or ‘Systematic Review’, for example, to narrow your search to just those article types.īut wait, there’s more. After performing a search, a left-hand navigation menu appears, which includes an ‘Article type’ menu. If you’re only interested in a specific type of article, say review articles, you can narrow your search to this specific type. Article TypeĪnytime you perform a search on PubMed, the default results page is for “All” results, no matter the type of article. You can be more thorough with the information you enter, but this strategy usually results in only one entry, or at most just a few, and then you can locate the one you really want. A very quick way to use it is to start entering the journal name (a menu of possible titles pops up), the publication year, and the last name of the first author (restricting choices to “only as first author”).
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PubMed has a handy tool if you’re trying to locate a specific reference: the single citation matcher. Also, keep in mind that truncation restricts your search to keywords only. Note that if a term is truncated too much, you will get a warning about receiving only the first 600 variations, so you’ll need to lengthen the root word search to get meaningful results. This can be very useful if you’re doing a broad search and will accept multiple forms of your search term, including plurals.Įxample: devel* (retrieves develop, develops, development, developmental, developing, etc.). Use * to replace one or more characters at the end of your search term. Olfactory bulb AND (cell death OR apoptosis) NOT developmentīut you don’t want papers on prenatal development You want all possible articles on this topic Olfactory bulb AND (cell death OR apoptosis) It may be a “good enough” search for you, but keep reading to discover ways to refine your results. Here are the results from a VERY simple search that is the likely starting point for most searchers. Say you’re interested in articles about cell death in the postnatal olfactory bulb. NOT is used when you want articles that EXCLUDE your search term.OR is used when you’re looking for articles that contain AT LEAST ONE of your search terms (broadens your search often used for synonyms).AND is used when you’re looking for articles that contain ALL of your search terms (narrows your search).Boolean operators – AND, OR, NOT – are used to combine search terms, and in PubMed they must be in UPPERCASE. You probably already use them, but may not know their formal name. Improve Your PubMed Searches: Basic Searching 1. Unless you’re avoiding the wet lab, not that I’ve ever used literature searches and background reading as an excuse to step away from the PCR machine, of course.
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Here are a few basic tips to help you improve your searches on the new PubMed without wasting a lot of time slogging through pages of results, thus getting you back to the bench ASAP. And then you get back about 8 billion results, which – this is just a guess – is far more than you’re likely to read. If you’re like me (before I wised up to the search power of PubMed), you probably just type in your topic of interest and press Go. Do you know how PubMed relates to the other NCBI databases?.Have you set up automatic updates with My NCBI?.Can you locate (and use) the Advanced Search Builder?.Are you familiar with Boolean operators?.Do you *really* know what you’re doing when you search for articles in PubMed?.