Welcome to the KU Medical Library guide for PubMed. This guide will give you an overview of PubMed, searching with basic and more advanced features, and how to work with citations. For questions or further training, please reach out to jason.fetty@ku.ac.ae.
What is PubMed?
PubMed is a research database providing abstracts in medicine, nursing, dentistry, allied health, and in other health sciences areas. PubMed is a product of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and includes citations in the health sciences journals going back over 70 years.
PubMed includes over 30 million citations for medical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Note that these citations do not often include full text. That is why even PubMed is freely available at pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov you should use the PubMed@KU version which will include links to full text within the KU collection.
Changes to PubMed
If you have not used PubMed in a while you should note that the interface and features were changed in an overhaul in 2020. Some sections (such as MeSH) retain their old look, but you will likely need some practice with the new design if it is your first time.
MEDLINE in Other Databases
You can also search MEDLINE at KU in Embase (another excellent, comprehensive medical database) and MEDLINE (EBSCO).
You can download the slides from the February 8, 2023, KU Library's workshop on PubMed below as a PDF file.