Difference between revisions of "PubMed"

Revision as of 14:06, 6 January 2010

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Improve your PubMed searches!

Everyone uses PubMed, but there are some quirks to it that most people dont know about. I provide a couple of resources and some hints to help you improve how you search through that database.

• Use Quotes!
  • Pubmed typically interprets non-quoted text. Sometimes it seems to translate quoted text too, but not as much. The craziest example is the difference between typing insula and 'insula' into the pubmed interface. For some reason, when not quoted, PubMed translates insula into cerebral cortex which is not quite the same thing

• Use qualifiers!
  • PubMed works off of xml structure, so you can choose which fields to search for. [tiab] after a search term only looks through titles and abtracts [au] looks through authors

• MeSH