Peg Burnette
Associate Professor Emerita
Medical & Biomedicine Librarian
phburn@illinois.edu
Anna Liss Jacobsen
Assistant Professor
Bioengineering & Engineering Medical Innovation Librarian
ajacobse@illinois.edu
Megan Sapp-Nelson
Head, Grainger Engineering
Library Information Center
enginlib@illinois.edu
Contact the Grainger Library at:
enginlib@illinois.edu
AND narrows a search (more precise; fewer results retrieved)
OR broadens a search (more inclusive; more results retrieved)
NOT excludes unwanted terms/concepts
An asterisk* after a term will find all variants of that term (child* will find child, children, childhood, etc.)
Use (parentheses) to search a group of terms as a set
Use "quotation marks" around a phrase to search those terms only a phrase.Caution: PubMed cannot match phrases in quotation marks to MeSH terms
[Mesh] typed after a known MeSH term will indicate that it be searched only as a MeSH term.
Use [tiab] after a term or phrase to indicate that the search be restriced to title and abstract fields only.
PubMed is a biomedical database that includes over 37 million citations in the fields of biomedicine and health. PubMed includes citations to scholarly books, articles, data and more. In addition to covering biomedical and health fields, PubMed includes citations on adjacent disciplines: life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering.
PubMed Overview. (August 15, 2023). National Institute of Health, National Library of Medicine, PubMed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/about/
This tutorial describes the sources you will find in PubMed as well as how journals are reviewed and evaluated to ensure that they meet quality guidelines.
5:56 minute tutorial
This tutorial shows you the basics of finding articles by topic in PubMed.
0.44 minute tutorial
This tutorial describes how PubMed interprets your search terms and phrases including mapping to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
4:04 minute tutorial
Learn how to use the advanced search builder to build and refine your PubMed searches.
3:17 minute tutorial
Learn how to use proximity searching to find variations of a phrase and build your search query.
4:03 minute tutorial
Learn how to find an article in PubMed using it's citation information like the article title, author, journal name, and date of publication.
1:13 minute tutorial
Learn how to save PubMed searches and set email alerts to be notified when there are new results found by your searches.
2:27 minute tutorial
This is a four module course providing training on constructing in-depth searches in PubMed.