Beyond the Basics

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.

Which approach will work best for my search?

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:

• start with a quick scoping search (see the basic PubMed) guide, then
• build a strategy from scratch using the MeSH Database
• build a strategy using the Advanced Search Builder

PubMed also has some special features, which form part of this guide: Links are provided to these where they are helpful in searching.