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Emergency Medical & Health Services: PubMed

The PubMed database

PubMed is a free index to millions of health-related articles. PubMed Central is a "subset" of the larger PubMed database and contains free full text. Because both databases are free, they don't have some of the features of commercial databases (such as ProQuest or Academic Search Complete); however, their coverage of EMS topics will make them very useful for you.

Using PubMed is nearly always a three step process:

  • Use the search engine to identify articles of interest
  • Hover over the journal name abbreviation to get the full name of the journal
  • Use the A-Z periodicals list, linked below, to find out if TCC can provide free access to the journal

Using PubMed Central is usually just one step (find and open an article)--but there are far fewer articles.

Below is a quick video tutorial on basic subject searching developed by the librarians at PubMed. In the tutorial they mention MeSH "headings."  These are key to conducting an efficient, focused, search.

The MeSH (Medical subject) heading for your field of study is Emergency Medical Services.

You may also want to click Limits and refine your search to only English language articles and humans (rather than animal studies).

PubMed database tips with video tutorials

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)

Explore PubMed:

PubMed tutorial:

More PubMed tips

The [MH] command searches for articles with specific MeSH headings.  There are three other "commands" that can be very useful:    

[TA]= journal name (not sure how they came up with that one!)  Use the full name of the journal or its “official” abbreviation which can be found by clicking on “Journal Browser” at the left side of the screen.  The abbreviations for some of your most important journal titles are:

 

  • Journal of Emergency Medical Services =  JEMS
  • EMS World = EMS World 
  • Prehospital Emergency care = Prehosp emerg care

I would use [TA] if I wanted articles from only one or two specific journals.  I might construct a search like this: 

 
"compartment syndrome" AND "JEMS"[ta] 

I am telling the search engine to look for articles about compartment syndrome only from the journal JEMS.

 

[TW]= Text words. Locates key words that are not necessarily MeSH terms from the text of the article abstracts

[TI]= Title words.  Locates key words that are not necessarily MeSH terms from the titles of the articles.   

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