Searching PubMed: Two ways |

[Guest author: Grace Romund, Librarian]

PubMed is the go-to source for getting the information you need to support your day to day practice. If you’re looking for a specific article or need clinical evidence on any given topic PubMed has developed a couple of tools that could help you find what you’re looking for faster.

Both of these tools can be accessed from the PubMed homepage under “PubMed Tools” at the centre of the page.

PubMed Clinical Queries

The first of these tools is PubMed Clinical Queries. This tool intended for clinicians is designed to provide information in three categories: Clinical Study Categories, Systematic Reviews, and Medical Genetics. First you enter search, terms such as “plantar fasciitis”, then your results screen will appear in three columns.

On the left, the Clinical Study Categories column will also allow you to further refine your search to what you need with category options:

Etiology
Diagnosis
Therapy (default)
Prognosis
Clinical prediction guides

And, also provides you with option of scope: to make your search broad or narrow.

The second column on the results page displays only systematic reviews related to your search terms, and the third column, Medical Genetics, provides sources related to various topics in medical genetics.

PubMed Single Citation Matcher

The second tool made available by PubMed is Single Citation Matcher. This is a great tool if you already know the name of a specific article you’re looking for or you want to see articles all by the same author. For example, if you wanted to see all articles in PubMed by Dr. Harvey Max Chochinov you could enter “Chochinov, Harvey” into the Author field on the Single Citation Manager search page and all articles listed on PubMed by this author.