What can PubMed do for me?
PubMed is the premier biomedical database and is free for anyone to use. You could think of it like a search engine specifically for articles about health and medicine. Use the link from this guide or Biomed's home page to make sure you can get to the full text using UC-eLinks. Bookmark or favorite this link for easy access.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?otool=ucsdlib
(It can also be used from off-campus.)
Did you know that in PubMed you can:
Use Filters to:
Jump to the PubMed Tutorial about Limits.
Use Clinical Queries to:
Google - to find good, authoritative web resources
Google can be a great way to find government information on the web. It might be a county, state, or national government organization, for example County of San Diego Public Health Services, California Department of Public Health, or the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. With a couple of simple steps, you can search your topic of interest and limit to the more authoritative literature instead of "Any Joe's" website.
use this to find government related websites
once you know the beginning of an organizations URL, use that to find your topic at their pages
put phases within quotation marks to find pages where the words are together
find more options and ways to direct your search
Google Scholar - to find scholarly articles not web pages
Find the scholarly articles in Google Scholar without having to deal with the web pages you don't want. Need that higher level of evidence to make your point? Need to see what experts have to say on your topic? You will find both by using articles published in professional journals (as opposed to newspapers and popular journals) and Google Scholar is one way to do that. It is easy to use but using some of the following tricks, you can target your search a bit more specific to your topic.
like regular Google, put phrases together
Find this option on the Advanced Search Page
Find this option on the Advanced Search Page or an an option on the left side.
5 Search Strategy Tips
Infographic that explains Boolean Operators and gives examples of their uses.
Truncation is a search technique that broadens your search to include various word endings. To truncate your search terms, replace the word ending with an asterisk *.
Limits provide database-specific recommendations for narrowing a search. Applying limits will filter out results that don’t meet your search requirements. This will save you time because you won’t need to look through pages of search results that don’t include the information that you need Each database offers different limits. Be sure to check them out to see how they can help you with your search.
For example: In the database, Historical Abstracts, you can filter your search results for peer review, publication date, document type, language, subject, etc.
The image below illustrates how applying limits will help you to narrow
your search results.
It's important to know that databases use subject headings to organize their articles. When you know the right subject headings for your topic, you can search more efficiently. Starting out on a new topic, you won't know the subject terminology. A simple way to find them is to start with a keyword search. When you find an article title that meets your needs, look for the subject headings assigned to that article. In most cases, those subject headings are hyperlinked and will take you to a list of articles with the same subject heading.
Scholarly articles often have extensive bibliographies, also called reference lists or works cited pages. Bibliographies include references to articles, books, and other relevant literature that were published before the article. Some databases provide links to the cited references so that you can look at those articles as well, which might provide more articles for you to use in your paper.
Cited References can help you find articles that are older than the one you are reading.
An Example:
Look at the example to the left. If you found a relevant article from 2003, you could look at the articles in the bibliography to see where your article got the information used to support their main points. These older articles can also be useful to your research, especially if you need to write a literature review.
You can use a similar method to find newer articles, by looking at the articles who have cited your 2003 article in their bibliographies. To find out more about this method, see the tab for Times Cited references.
Some databases, like Web of Science, include times cited references. Think of these as the opposite of a bibliography. Where bibliographies include references that are older than the article, times cited references are newer than the article.
Times Cited references can help you find articles that are more recent than the one you are reading.
An Example:
Look at the example to the left. Let’s say your professor doesn’t let you include references in your paper that are older than 2005. You are finding articles about your topic, but they are all too old. Even the best article about your topic was published in 2003.
Using times cited references, you could see which articles have cited the 2003 article. Chances are you will find one published a more recently that you could use for your paper.
When you find an article that you think will be a good to use, you can take advantage of “related articles” to find similar articles. Databases have different formulas for determining how an article is “related,” but it usually is a combination of same keywords and descriptors.
You can usually find a list of related articles on the results screen of the database.
