PubMed search
Organize the Process
Being organized is extremely important! Take time to think about how you will organize your information before you get too far into it. Here are some things you'll need to keep track of:
- Your thoughts
- Use Word documents or a note-taking software like Evernote or OneNote to keep track of your research troughts and questions.
- Your live search strategies
- Most databases let you save searches - make use of that whenever possible to allow for easy recovery, further development, and auto-alerts of new materials.
- Your search strategies for reporting
- Capturing your search strategies in image (screenshot) and text form makes reporting your methodology easy when it's time to write your manuscript, as well as giving you an easy way to see your search at a glance. Word documents or Excel speadsheets are a good way to store text.
- Your articles
- Use a citation manager! More information below.
Citation Management Tools
Citation managers are software packages used to create personalized databases of citation information and notes. They allow you to import and organize citation information from article indexes and other sources; save pdfs and other documents; and format citations for your papers and bibliographies using APA and many other styles. include your own notes.
- Zotero
- Zotero is a freely available citation manager that helps you manage your PDF collections. It is the recommended starting point when choosing a reference manager.
Find Information
- Ovid MEDLINEOVID, like PubMed, is an interface to search the MEDLINE database. It includes citations from the fields of medicine, public health, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and the basic biomedical sciences. MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's bibliographic database/article index that contains over 17 million references to journal articles. Coverage is from 1949 to the present. Over 5200 journals worldwide in over 37 languages are indexed.
Help resources for Ovid MEDLINE
Literature Searching in Ovid Medline Tutorial Series: Learn about literature searching in Ovid Medline including how to use MeSH headings and keywords, how to limit a search, how to find full text and how to save a search.
- PubMedSearches MEDLINE, which is the primary source of journal articles for the health sciences (fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, public health, health care systems, and basic sciences). Coverage is from the 1940s to the present. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.
- Embase / Embase ClassicEmbase is a biomedical and pharmacological database covering journal articles, conference proceedings, and gray literature. It is strong in its coverage of pharmaceutical research and international and non-English content. Covers 1947 to present.
- CINAHL Ultimate (Nursing & Allied Health)Covers nursing and allied health journal articles, book chapters, and dissertations, as well as providing summarized evidence-based resources such as care sheets and quick lessons.
- APA PsycInfoFind articles in thousands of psychology journals, from 1806 to current. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.
- ScopusSearch for information from scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Covers the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
- All subject guidesListing of all subject guides from the University Libraries
Resources for Systematic and Critical Reviews
- Systematic Review and Evidence SynthesisThis guide is intended to help researchers learn more about types of evidence syntheses. It provides an overview of the evidence synthesis process, guidance documents for conducting evidence synthesis projects, and links to resources to help you conduct a comprehensive and systematic search of the scholarly literature.
- Types of ReviewsWhat are the different types of reviews that can be done? This resource summarizes key features of 14 types of review methodologies.
- Systematic Reviews: Tools for Screening & ExtractionRecommended software for managing reviews, extracting data, and creating evidence tables.
Resources for Assessing Impact
- Journal Citation Reports: JCR (InCites)Journal Citation Reports helps you evaluate and compare scholarly and technical journals. Includes the Impact Factor for these journals.
- Research Impact MeasuresExplore some of the most commonly-accepted measures currently used, including Individual Impact Measures, Research Group/Department Impact Measures, Institution/University Impact Measures, Journal Impact Measures, and Altmetrics.
- Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE)Have you recently written a paper, but you're not sure to which journal you should submit it? Or maybe you want to find relevant articles to cite in your paper? Or are you an editor, and do you need to find reviewers for a particular paper? Jane can help! Just enter the title and/or abstract of the paper in the box, and click on 'Find journals', 'Find authors' or 'Find Articles'. Jane will then compare your document to millions of documents in PubMed to find the best matching journals, authors or articles.
- PubMed PubReMinerPubReMiner organizes PubMed search results into frequency tables that include year, journal, author, keyword, MeSH terms, substances, publication type and country. Use PubReMiner to to identify pertinent key words and MeSH terms for a search topic, journals most likely to publish papers on a particular subject or authors specialized in a specific area.