PubMed is the National Library of Medicine’s comprehensive database of citations in the biomedical literature. Publicly-funded, the database is free to use.

The benefits of PubMed include tools to focus and expand your searches. You can sort and refine your results by study type, date, species, or full-text availability.  Additionally, you can have citations saved or emailed to you. These are just a few of the tools available with PubMed.

Short tutorials online explain more about using the

• Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) database to build a better PubMed search
• Filters sidebar
• Advanced Search Builder

Citations include both open and pay-walled articles. If an open version is available, either in the NLM’s own open access archive (PubMed Central) or elsewhere, the listing will include a link to the full text. Be aware that by limiting your results to full PubMed Central, you may be overly limiting your results. If you find an article you want and don’t see a full-text access link, the librarian can order it for you using DOCLINE.