Medline Guide

Basic searching | Truncation | Phrase searching | Entrez date limit | Displaying more details
Printing and Saving | Finding related articles | Boolean searching

this guide in Word

MEDLINE is a database covering citations from nearly 4,000 journals to health, medicine, nursing and preclinical sciences

It can be searched using the PubMed interface at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/

Basic Searching

To search MEDLINE, enter search terms in the query box and click the Search button.
PubMed looks for records containing all the terms and also uses Automatic Term mapping.

Automatic Term Mapping matches terms against a MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) table,
a Journals table, a phrase list, and an Author index.

Truncation

Placing an asterisk at the end of a term (e.g. infect*) will find all terms that begin with those letters
(e.g., infection, infections, infectious). It will not find phrases (e.g. "infection control.")

Truncation turns off automatic term mapping.
For example, heart attack* will not map to the MeSH term, Myocardial Infarction.

Phrase Searching

PubMed groups terms into logical phrases.
For example, if you enter poison ivy, PubMed recognises these two words as a phrase and searches it as one search term.

If you do not want to search for poison ivy as a phrase, you must enter it as poison AND ivy.

You can force PubMed to search for a phrase by entering it between double quotes “ ” (e.g. “bcra 1”).
This is useful if you aren't sure how PubMed will treat the terms. This also turns off automatic term mapping.

Entrez Date limit

Use the "Entrez Date limit" pull-down menu to limit retrieval to a pre-selected time period
when the citation was added to the database.

Displaying More Details

To display more details (e.g. abstracts) about citations, select all those you are interested in by

• clicking in the box at the left hand side and then
• clicking on Display at the top of the list.

Printing and Saving

You can only print or save the citations from the displayed page.

To increase the 20 per page display default so that all are displayed on one page:
• click on the pull down menu "Number of documents to display per page:"
• select a higher number and click Search.

Printing: Use the Print function of your Web browser.

Saving: To save the citations in the brief format on the Document Summary Page,
use the Save function of your Web browser.

To save more detailed information for selected citations:

• display the citations in the desired format using the pull down menu at the top
• scroll to the bottom of the display and select the appropriate system and format
• click on the Save button and follow the instructions

Use the MEDLINE report format and select Text to download records to import into a database (e.g. ProCite)

Finding Related Articles

Citations in PubMed have a See Related Articles link that will retrieve articles in MEDLINE
that closely relate to the selected article.

Boolean Searching

you may enter Boolean search statements in any PubMed query box.

• Boolean operators, AND, OR, NOT must be in UPPERCASE, e.g., vitamin c OR zinc.
• terms inside parentheses are processed as a unit:
e.g. to find articles that deal with the effects of heat or humidity on multiple sclerosis, use

(heat OR humidity) AND multiple sclerosis

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