How to search PubMed

Searching PubMed requires you to have an answerable research question and a well developed search strategy.  If you don't have these you may wish to review:

Basic searching in PubMed is as simple as adding in a few words or phrases into the search box.

Basic searching requires an understanding of keyword searching, boolean operators and some search techniques:

Searching with keywords:

1. From the PubMed main search window, click in the search box.
2. Type in your term (e.g. mortality).
3. Click Search (button).

Searching with more than one keyword

If you are using more than one keyword you need to consider how to combine the keywords to get the items you want.  You do this with boolean operators. When using boolean operators you may also need to consider using brackets for your search to help control when those operations are done.  

Controlling keyword searches

What if you only want to look for keywords in specific parts of the item record?  Each part of the item record is known as a field.  You can focus your search by only looking for keywords in the title field or in the title and abstract fields.  This is known as Field Searching.

There are two ways to combine concepts in PubMed. 

• You can use boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT) within the search box. 
• You can select the search lines you want to combine in Advanced (described in example search below) by combining search line numbers in the Query Box with boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT).

For a search on the topic of "What is the risk of mortality due to cell phone use in distracted teen drivers?" we might want to search the concepts of mortality, cell phone, distracted driving and teens. 

Each group of terms for a particular concept are entered together and searched separately.

mortal* OR fatal* OR death

"cell phone*" OR "cellular phone*" OR "mobile phone*" OR smartphone* OR cellphone*

"distracted driv*" OR "driving while distracted" OR "inattentive driv*"

teen* or adolescen* or youth or young

Enter this search into PubMed:

1. From the PubMed search page:
2. Copy and paste this search in the search box:
   mortal* OR fatal* OR death
3. Click Search (button).
4. Copy and paste this search in the search box:
   "cell phone*" OR "cellular phone*" OR "mobile phone*" OR smartphone* OR cellphone*
5. Click Search (button).
6. Copy and paste this search in the search box:
   "distracted driv*" OR "driving while distracted" OR "inattentive driv*"
7. Click Search (button).
8. Copy and paste this search in the search box:
   teen* or adolescen* or youth or young
9. Click Search (button).
10. Click Advanced (link; below the search box).
11. Now we need to combine the separate concepts using AND.
12. To connect these separate concepts, type in a # followed by the search line number then AND for each of the concepts searched. (e.g. #1 AND #2 AND #3 AND #4)
13. Click the Search (button) to proceed with the search.

Combining keyword concepts using Brackets

For less complex searches you can use brackets to help you combine searches all on one line.

National Library of Medicine. “Combining Searches Using History.” PubMed User Guide, National Library of Medicine, 2024, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/help/#combining-history.