LibGuides: PubMed: Best Practices for Searching PubMed

Searching in PubMed

The National Library of Medicine has a PubMed Tutorials YouTube Channel which includes brief videos on a variety of search strategies. See all of them here, or get started with the ones shown below.

Start Simple - Use PubMed's Basic Search Box

What are MeSH terms and How Do I Use Them in a Search?

How do I Conduct an Advanced Search?

Newest PubMed search strategy: Proximity Searching

PubMed Search Tools

Evidence Based Medicine Search Tool (National Library of Medicine) How to search MEDLINE/PubMed using the PICO format or How to create a well-built clinical question
MeSH on Demand (National Library of Medicine) "MeSH on Demand identifies MeSH® terms in your submitted text (abstract or manuscript). MeSH on Demand also lists PubMed similar articles relevant to your submitted text."
PubMed Clinical Queries (National Library of Medicine) This tool uses predefined filters to help you quickly refine PubMed searches on clinical or disease-specific topics.
PubMed PICO Tool (National Library of Medicine) Insert your PICO terms into the appropriate box, run your search, and receive a set of results from PubMed. Abstracts and citations to related articles are provided. Limitation: The "Full Text" link for each article takes you back to the PubMed homepage, where you would need to search the title of the article.
PubMed Search Tester (GitHub) "A common method for constructing a PubMed search strategy for a new hedge or systematic review is to spend time creating a validation set to test different variants. A search developer will spend time collating citations from reviews (or even hand-searching core journals in the field) in order to compile a list of "known good" citations. Armed with this, she can test different iterations of a search strategy and see which ones perform best in terms of picking up relevant citations (those from the "good" list) while rejecting everything else. This is an effective approach, but constructing the initial validation list often takes considerable time and resources. PubMed Search Tester is designed to streamline this process."
Yale MeSH Analyzer (Yale University) Enter PubMed record ID numbers (PMIDs) to generate a chart showing the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms assigned to all of the articles.
Anne O’Tate (University of Illinois at Chicago) A free, public web-based tool to support user-driven summarization, drill-down and mining of search results from PubMed. A set of hotlinked buttons allows the user to sort and rank retrieved articles according to important words in titles and abstracts; topics; author names; affiliations; journal names; publication year; and clustered by topic. Any result can be further mined by choosing any other button, and small search results can be expanded to include related articles.
Visualizing PubMed (GitHub) Explore these different visualization tools for exploring concepts in PubMed result sets, comparing different result sets, and to depict and graph PubMed results.