PubMed includes some specialized search tools to help you quickly find evidence-based literature. See the Evidence Based Practice page of our PubMed via LHL guide for a tour of these features.
Sign up for a My NCBI account to:
Click the box below for a tutorial on saving searches:
Click box below for a tutorial on saving individual results to a collection:
Check out our PubMed for Mobile Devices page on our "PubMed via LHL" guide
PubMed comprises more than 23 million citations to biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. It indexes mostly articles, but also some online books and covers the date range 1950s to present. You can access PubMed from this guide or the Lister Hill Library homepage. On the homepage, click the "PubMed via LHL" logo in the middle. You'll want to access PubMed through the library website while at UAB to gain access to licensed full-text. (Note: Once you graduate, you can access PubMed at www.pubmed.gov.) In addition to the information on this guide, we also have a complete guide on PubMed via LHL.
PubMed indexes articles using a controlled vocabulary called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®)
This means that a specific set of terms is assigned to describe each article. This provides consistency and uniformity so all articles about a certain subject will be retrieved, even if different terms for the concept are used in the article. One example where different terms are commonly used is myocardial infarction and heart attack.
MeSH terms are arranged in a hierarchical manner and are updated annually.
Familiarity with this vocabulary will make you a better PubMed searcher. You can find MeSH terms and search PubMed with them using the MeSH Database.
This 3-minute overview tutorial demonstrates several features of the MeSH Database that can be used to create a more targeted subject search.
For a more in-depth review of identifying and searching with MeSH terms, view the following two tutorials. The first one is a 9-minute tutorial demonstrating how to find appropriate MeSH terms for a PubMed search. Specifically, the tutorial walks you through:
In your own searches, you will likely find yourself using a combination of these three approaches.
Note: Click the to Full Screen button on the bottom right 
to expand the tutorial to full screen.
This 10-minute tutorial demonstrates how to perform a subject search in PubMed using MeSH terms.
Note: Click the to Full Screen button on the bottom right to expand the tutorial to full screen.
Use PubMed's Clipboard feature to save results temporarily.
The Clipboard: