PubMed.gov is an extensive searchable collection of citations for medical and biomedical journal articles that often link to full text 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:
– The PubMed User Guide explains how to search for journal articles.
– Use tags to limit results to articles that have a specific term in a search field, such as the article’s title or its abstract. Use sidebar filters to limit search results based on categories such as the type of article, as demonstrated in this video.
– Search terms are expanded automatically to include synonyms, such as the scientific term for a word entered in layman’s terms.
– Creating Alerts explains how to be notified when there are new results in PubMed that meet your search criteria.
– After an article is selected from search results, Pubmed gives the option to see other articles that are “similar to” or “cited by” the article.
– An alternate search option, PubMed Clinical Queries, makes it easier to find research about clinical issues. As shown in this video demonstration, select either Clinical Studies or Covid-19 and then from the drop down menu select Therapy, Clinical Prediction Guides, Diagnosis, Etiology or Prognosis.
Reviewed October 2025