PubMed Central is a searchable collection of free medical and biomedical journal articles.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, publishes the website. The NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) created the website’s search engine, which indexes a long list of journals.
Tips for use:
– FAQs describe PubMed Central (PMC) in detail, while the PMC User Guide explains how to use the website (scroll to the section called PMC Article Search).
– PMC’s search engine automatically includes synonyms such as scientific terminology for a word entered in layman’s terms.
– After an article is selected from search results, PMC gives the option to see other articles that are “similar to” or “cited by” the article.
Reviewed October 2025