PubMed: A Beginner's Guide to Finding Articles

This video demonstrates how to get started using the database PubMed. You'll learn more about PubMed, what it's useful for, and how to get started searching for articles about health, nutrition, and medicine.

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Alex, I'm a librarian at The University of Alabama, and in this tutorial, we're going to talk about PubMed - what it is, why you might use it, and how to get started searching for articles.
We have a series of tutorials devoted to PubMed - today's is just the introduction. We'll show you the basics of searching PubMed, and provide more advanced help in other tutorials.
PubMed is a database provided by the National ?Library of Medicine. It's one of the best options for finding peer-reviewed, scientific literature on health, medicine, nutrition, and related fields. Most, but not all, articles that you'll find in PubMed are peer-reviewed.
When you search on PubMed you'll find a huge collection of medical and biomedical ?articles. One thing to remember is that some of the articles you'll find are not available in full-text. That means you won't have immediate access to the full article. Some of the articles that you'll find on PubMed are considered open access - that means they're freely available to anyone. Some are available in full-text to you because The University of Alabama provides access to them. And some won't be available at all - at least not immediately.You can request those articles for free through interlibrary loan.
Let's go ahead and get started trying to find scholarly, scientific articles. We'll start with a simple keyword search. And here are your search results. On the left you'll see a menu of search filters that you can use. We'll explore those more in another tutorial.
When you click on an article, you'll see this page. If you want to access the full-text of the article, just look to your top right. Remember that sometimes you won't be able to immediately access the full-text. In this case, you can.
Back on this page, you'll also find more information about the article. For example, the abstract, which is just a summary of the article. You'll also see a list of related articles, which can be very helpful sometimes. And a list of articles that cited this particular article.
You can also generate a citation in multiple citation styles. And at the top of the screen, you'll see some options for saving and organizing your articles. If you're just starting out, I would recommend email. That just allows you to email this particular page to yourself, or someone you know.
And that's all for this tutorial. We have other PubMed tutorials available if you want to learn more. And if you have a question, just ask a librarian.