Nursing & Health Sciences

What is PubMed and When Should I Use It?

PubMed is a free resource that can be used to find citations for biomedical and life sciences literature. It contains more than 33 million citations and abstracts.

PubMed can be an extremely useful tool but to get the most out of your search, it's important to know when and how to use it. Remember that it is a database of citations, not a database of full-text articles.

Pubmed is good for

• Finding citations of all the research published on a particular topic (e.g. literature reviews)
• Finding a researcher's publication records
• Keeping up to date on recent publications on a topic

To find free, full text nursing and biomedical content, try searching in PubMed Central.