PubMed is the National Library of Medicine’s free search interface for Medline.
If you have not used PubMed before, we recommend you look at our basic PubMed guide before trying the options outlined here.
If you want to find papers to inform a clinical question or get an idea of the shape of research in an area, then choose the quick scoping search outlined in the basic PubMed guide.
The advanced search techniques in this guide will allow you to build a formal search strategy. There are three ways you can do this:
PubMed also has some special features, which form part of this guide: Links are provided to these where they are helpful in searching.