PubMed is the world's largest database of biomedical and health sciences literature. PubMed is a free resource with the aim of improving health–both globally and personally.

PubMed comprises over 39 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books, citations and abstracts dating back to 1966, selectively to 1865, and very selectively to the early 1800's.

• PubMed launched in 1996, is the interface used to access Medline, PubMed Central, plus additional materials (preprints, pre 1966 citations not yet updated to Medline, NCBI bookshelf, etc.). The earliest literature in PubMed dates back to the early 1800's.  
  • The name PubMed means for Public access to Medline.
• MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine (NLM) journal citation database; previously MEDLARS which launched in 1964. 
• PubMed Central launched in 2000 as a free archive for full-text biomedical and life sciences journal articles.
• MeSH, or Medical Subject Headings, are the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary for indexing articles for MEDLINE/PubMed. Searching by using MeSH provide a consistent way to retrieve information that may use different terminology for the same concepts; locate MeSH using the MeSH database.

Basic Searching

To perform a basic topic search, enter your topic keywords, and select search. For best results:

• Be as specific as possible with your search terms.
• Do NOT use punctuation, quotation marks, truncation, or operators like "and", "or". Let PubMed make these connections. 

For example, if you were interested in "yoga" and "mental health" and "prisons" search for:  

Filter Information

Filters allow you to refine your search results by specifying additional criteria. Filter options appear to the left of your results. To apply filters: 

• Click on a filter to apply it to your search. Active filters appear above your search results.
  • Filters "stick" and are applied to future searches until you turn them off.
• You may be able to  select multiple filters within a single category.
  • For example by selecting Clinical Trial and Review under the Article Type category, you are limiting results to either Clinical Trial or Review articles.

• To view a detailed graph of publication dates, click the expand icon to display an expanded view from which you can set the publication date filter. 

  

Only some filters are displayed by default. 

• Click on Additional Filters to view additional options such as numerous additional article types, species, language, sex, subject,  journal and age filters, and more.