Find more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content (i.e. not all articles will be available to you)
Because medical terminology can differ quite a bit from lay terminology, you may wish to search the MeSH thesaurus (the National Library of Medicine’s controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for PubMed) before you begin searching to ensure the best and most relevant results.
The syntax (proper way to construct a search “sentence”) in PubMed is: search term[field abbreviation]. In other words, the search term, no space, square brackets enclosing the abbreviation for the requested field. For example if I wanted the database to search for articles where the word diabetes is the subject of the article (not just a keyword), and the words nurse or nursing are also the subject I would type:
diabetes[mh] nurs*[mh]
These are the abbreviations for the most commonly used fields and search strategies:
Field name |
Abbreviation for use in searching |
---|---|
Author |
au |
Title of article |
ti |
Title of journal or “source” (exact) |
ta |
Abstract |
ab |
MeSH subject heading |
mh |
MeSH subject heading—“major” |
majr |
Wildcard symbol * |
Use only in “keyword” searches |
Phrase search (words in exact order) |
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