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Using PubMed in Evidence-Based Practice

Please consider reviewing and completing PubMed's evidence-based training course to get the most out of the research process. If you're tight on time, then review the searching tutorials below in the Searching in PubMed tab.

When conducting research, evidence-based practice is a method for framing clinical questions that will help yield optimal search results. PubMed.gov is a free research tool from the National Library of Medicine®. This course will show you how to use evidence-based practice when searching clinical questions using PubMed®.

Click on the image to open the training course.

new window to PubMed course

(Image Source: iStock Photos, ©)

Using PubMed for Research

PubMed® comprises more than 33 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher websites.

Watch the video to learn more about PubMed.

PubMed is similar to the library databases, it has scholarly articles, you can use filters (limiters) to narrow your results, you can create an account to save your research and it includes a citation tool. However, boolean operators are not used in PubMed.

DO NOT use boolean operators in PubMed, their database system will automatically match your keywords to the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and tag them with the appropriate boolean operators in the backend. Watch the video, Subject Search: How It Works, to learn about it.

Watch these short interactive PubMed videos to learn how to search and navigate inside PubMed.

Other Basic PubMed Tutorials

PubMed Tutorials for Advanced Users and Searches

  • Using PubMed to Find Human-Related Studies This brief tutorial for expert users of PubMed explains how to search for studies indexed as being related to humans, how to separately search non-indexed records, and how to combine these two searches into one string.
  • PubMed: Using the Advanced Search Builder Learn to use PubMed's Advanced Search features to refine your search with the example of a publication date range; and find journal and author names using the autocomplete feature.

Now that you have reviewed all the interactive PubMed tutorials in the "Searching in PubMed" tab, you are ready to try your own search terms in PubMed.

YVC Database Example

Watch the videos below to see a demonstration of using PubMed's search term example, gut microbiome allergy, in a YVC database. All the research skills can be applied to any other YVC database.

YVC logo used to indicate an instructional video