CANCER RESEARCH ONLINE MADE EASY
PUB MED
Can you tell me more about Pub Med? Pub Med is a search service of the National Library of Medicine that allows you to search a database of over 16 million article citations from Medline and other life science journals dating back to the 1950’s. What this means is that almost every article ever written in medical journals about your disease is going to be in this database. And the great thing is that this database can be searched for free from the comfort of your home just using your computer. Just as you enter terms to search using a search engine such as Google, you enter terms to search Pub Med. The challenge with Pub Med is to learn how to do searches so that you end up with useful information. When I find an article after searching Pub Med will I get the entire article? As a default, Pub Med is set to display a brief amount of information on an article -- the title, the authors, the date of publication, and the journal in which the article was published. This very brief bit of information is called a summary. Here is what a typical summary looks like:
What you see are the names of the authors on the first line in light blue. The second line is the title of the article and then the journal reference is included on the third line. On the fourth line is a Pub Med reference number. In this summary, you can see that the article was published in J Clin Oncol (which is the Journal of Clinical Oncology) in the Often, more information is available in what is called an abstract. This extra information is a brief review of the actual details of the study and is very informative. You can tell if the abstract is available by looking to see if there are horizontal black lines in the file folder to the left of the title. In this case, we can see the horizontal black lines so we know that the abstract is available.
Here then is the abstract:
This is typically what you’ll be able to access online. Since our goal is to educate you to ask the right questions and to know about cutting-edge issues, the abstract is usually sufficient. Occasionally, the entire article is available online for free but usually, if you want to read the entire article, you’ll have to either go to your medical library or pay for the article online. Most of the time you won’t need to read an entire article unless you’re really doing in-depth research and want to see all the details of a particular study. Remember, the premise and the conclusions of a study are available in the abstract.
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