PubMed offers options to change the display format and to sort the results.
Display options
Results can be displayed in various formats:
- Summary - displays the article citation information and snippets of the abstract that contain your search terms. You can opt to hide the snippets.
- Abstract - displays the article citation information, the full abstract, MeSH terms, a link to Cited by articles, a link to the article's references, and full text links (including the FindIt@UT button).
You can choose the number of results to be displayed on each page: 10, 20, 50, 100, 200.
Sort by
Options are:
- Best Match - this is the default setting and is a relevance ranking
- Most recent - based on the date of indexing (i.e. entry into PubMed)
- Publication date
- First author
- Journal
Feel like getting into the weeds? If interested in how PubMed's Best Match ranking works, read the following article:
Kiester L, Turp C. Artificial intelligence behind the scenes: PubMed's Best Match algorithm. J Med Libr Assoc. 2022 Jan 1;110(1):15-22. doi: 10.5195/jmla.2022.1236. PMID: 35210958; PMCID: PMC8830327. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8830327/