About the author

Carrie Iwema

Carrie is an Information Specialist in Molecular Biology for the Health Sciences Library System at the University of Pittsburgh. She has a PhD in Neuroscience and a Masters in Library Science.

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• Do you *really* know what you’re doing when you search for articles in PubMed?
• Are you familiar with Boolean operators?
• What does â€?MeSHâ€? mean to you?
• Can you locate (and use) the Limits tab? History? Details?
• Have you set up automatic updates with MyNCBI?
• Do you know how PubMed relates to the other NCBI databases?

If you’re like me (before I wised up to the search power of PubMed) you probably just type in your topic of interest and press Go. And then you get back about 8 billion results, which—this is just a guess—is far more than you’re likely to read.

Here are a few basic tips to help you get the most out of your PubMed searches without wasting a lot of time slogging through pages of results, thus getting you back to the bench ASAP. Unless, of course, you’re avoiding the wet lab…not that I’ve ever used literature searches and background reading as an excuse to step away from the PCR machine… (more…)