Mount Sinai users should access PubMed from the Library's home page on the left sidebar under Key Resources, or from the Library's Databases page.

Accessing PubMed through the Library allows you to connect directly from PubMed to many of the Library's full-text articles.

Read about off campus access.

To search for a topic, type your terms in the search box. If necessary, combine keywords using AND & OR (in all caps).

AND retrieves hits where all terms appear. OR retrieves hits where either term appears.

Look at the Search details box (to the right of the Results list) to see how PubMed has translated the search.

PubMed's automatic term mapping function is powerful. In this case, it translated "heart attack" into myocardial infarction and "ekg" into electrocardiography. It is also searching for those two synonyms.

Search for an author by typing the author's last name, a space, and the first initial and middle initial, if known.

Search for a citation by typing what you know of the citation into the search box, or use Advanced Search.

Click the link above the search box to get to the Advanced Search screen.

Use the Advanced Search screen to specify how you want to search. Use the drop-down menus to choose your search fields.

The Author and Journal fields will suggest names for you as you type.

More about field searching (PDF)

Use the checkboxes to limit your results by publication type, age range, language and more.

Limits will stay in effect through multiple searches, until you remove them.

More about Advanced Search (PDF)

Use MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) to search by subject (not keyword). E.g. a regular search for "AIDS" retrieves the disease AIDS as well as hearing aids, teaching aids, etc. Selecting the MeSH term for AIDS: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome[MeSH] will limit your retrieval to the relevant subject.

Use the drop-down menu above the search box to select MeSH, and search for a term.

Select an appropriate term, and a subheading if desired. Attaching subheadings to a MeSH term allows you to focus on a specific aspect of the topic. E.g. This search will be for "prevention of influenza" and will not retrieve articles where "prevention" and "influenza" are both mentioned as separate concepts.

Restrict Search to Major Topic headings if you want your topic to be a major focus (not a secondary focus) of the articles you retrieve.

Send to the Search Box.

The MeSH database search box is available at the top if you would like to add additional MeSH terms to the search statement.

Finally, select Search PubMed to run your MeSH search in PubMed.

More about MeSH searching (PDF)

PubMed's Clinical Queries uses Evidence Based Medicine filters to find clinical studies that use the best research methodologies for selected question types (therapy, diagnosis, etiology, prognosis).

Find the link to Clinical Queries at the bottom of the PubMed homepage and the bottom of the Advanced Search page.

Type your search terms in the box, select your category and scope, and send the search to PubMed by clicking GO.

A separate search box filters for systematic reviews.

Use the Send to link to save citations you are interested in to the Clipboard, a temporary holding space. Citations will stay on the Clipboard for 8 hours and you can print them, email them, or export them to RefWorks or EndNote.

Or, create a free MyNCBI account to save lists of citations permanently, as well as save search strategies, create search alerts, and more. To save citations to a MyNCBI account, use the Send to link to send citations to Collections.

Display your list of results in Abstract format by clicking on Display Settings and selecting Abstract.

Link to full-text articles provided by the Library by using the blue MSSM LinkOut button and the yellow FIND IT button. The publisher's buttons (e.g. Elsevier, Wiley) will not always work.

More about connecting to full-text

Visit our interactive PubMed Tutorial for a short course on using PubMed effectively. Practice your searches in PubMed while you are learning about the database.

Librarians are available to support your research. For help with a search, to learn more about PubMed, or to schedule individual assistance, please call 212-241-7204 or Ask a Librarian.