Searching for Medical Articles with PubMed

NOTE: With the closing of the Library, interlibrary loan is unavailable.

The gold standard database of medical journal abstracts is PubMed/Medline, a service of the US National Library of Medicine, which indexes 5300+ biomedical journals.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Is there a fee for using PubMed?

You can get to PubMed from any computer at any location free of charge, because it is a public database.

Is there a username and password?
Just go to http://pubmed.gov/. That's it, no username or password required.

Are there actual full text articles in PubMed?
Yes, there are some free full text articles available. Some are provided by the journal publishers, and others are from PubMed Central(PMC), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Here is a list of the PMC Journals.

How do I find the free full text articles?

After entering your topic, a link on the right hand side of the screen will alert you to the number of free full text articles. Screen shots of PubMed.

Why can't I get to the article I want?

If there is a link to full text, but you get the dreaded "you are attempting to access restricted content" message, or a screen asking for a username and password or the link is no longer valid, and you still want the article, you will need to provide a credit card number for "pay per view" to the publisher.

Can I search just nursing journal articles?

Go to Advanced Search, and scroll down to Limit by Topics, Languages and Journal Groups, and under subsets choose "Nursing Journals."

PubMed doesn't look the same. What happened?

PubMed was redesigned with a new interface in November 2009.

Where do I find more information?

PubMed Redesign from NLM Technical Bulletin

PubMed Ten Tips from UNC-Chapel Hill

PubMed Tutorial from NLM

Related Posts

PubMed Redesign: Where has it gone?

Sign up for the Loansome Doc Ordering System

Physiotherapy Evidence Database: PEDro

PEDro is a free database of over 15,500 randomised trials, systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines in physiotherapy. Some of the articles and guidelines are available free online.

For each trial, review or guideline, PEDro provides the citation details, the abstract and a link to the full text, where possible. All trials on PEDro are independently assessed for quality. These quality ratings are used to quickly guide users to trials that are more likely to be valid and to contain sufficient information to guide clinical practice.

PEDro is produced by the Centre for Evidence-Based Physiotherapy at The George Institute for International Health.

Respiratory Care Journal

The official journal of the American Association of Respiratory Care, Respiratory Care, provides free access to articles older than one year, going back to 1990.

Medline: PubMed.gov for articles

Use PubMed.gov to access Medline, the premier source of medical journal literature.

Some articles will be free full text, others won't.

PubMed has a page of online tutorials.

Related Post:
PubMed Redesign: Where has it gone?