BNURS 520 & 522: Translational Research I & II: PubMed

PubMed: (Publicly accessible - but some full text is UW Restricted). The National Library of Medicine's search service to over 37 million citations in Medline and related databases.  (UW Health Sciences Library How-to Guide.) (UW HSL PubMed Free Account Guide: MyNCBI.)

There are several videos in the Quick Tours section of the PubMed Online Training page. Check PubMed News for updates.

The PubMed interface smart search recommends searching without punctuation first. If needed, use the asterisk (*) symbol to retrieve multiple variations of a word; e.g. nurs* will retrieve nurse, nursed, nurses, and nursing. (Search tips for this database). 

If you are off-campus and want to access the UW Restricted full text in PubMed, click on the PubMed link above and you should be prompted to login with you UW NetID and password.

PubMed Guides and Tutorials:

• BNURS 525: PubMed activity in Canvas. Your PubMed assignment from BNURS 525 applies to this course! It contains how to information such as getting to PubMed, searching, MeSH Terms, filtering, locating the full text of articles, Interlibrary Loan, citing tips, and more.
  • The Using PubMed in Evidence-Based Practice-Training Course provides an overview of the features of PubMed and was used in the Searching in PubMed BNURS 525 assignment.

To Search for Research Articles in PubMed:

1. Type your search into the search box(es). Examples: registered nurse job satisfaction program evaluation
                                                                                                                   or
                                                                                      improve nurses job satisfaction retention

If needed, you can add the word classical article, qualitative, or quantitative to your search. (Optional -- refer to the UW HSL guide for "Finding Qualitative Research Articles")
            Examples:   -- diabetes education classical article
                               -- indigenous peoples native americans diabetes qualitative
                               -- aged female chronic pain treatment quantitative

Search for qualitative articles with MeSH Terms, by adding them to your search words:

• There is no "qualitative" publication type in PubMed, but according the UW HSL Finding Qualitative Research Articles: PubMed page you can type in or search by the following MeSH Terms: Qualitative Research; Interviews as Topic; Focus Groups; Grounded Theory, Nursing Methodology Research; Anecdotes as Topic; Narration; Video Recording; Tape Recording; Personal Narratives as Topic; and Observational Study as Topic.

2. (Optional) Try locating a couple Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that are relevant to your search topic that you can use.

• You can select a new search strategy from this list of MeSH terms to do a more focused search. Copy and paste them into a list for you to refer to.
• Recent articles may not have publication types or MeSH terms assigned yet.

Options:

• MeSH On Demand tool – copy and paste or type in your research question/draft literature review topic and it will suggest MeSH terms, and link to articles (PubMed ID links = PMID). Click on the Search button, and the scroll down to see the results. Some articles will be available online, and others will not.
  • This tool is outside of the UW system, so you will have to bring the article titles, or PubMed IDs, back into the UW system to see what full text we have available. You can search by article title in the UW Libraries Search system, or by using this PubMed link.
• Mesh Database - search for one concept at a time
  • The MeSH Database is linked on the PubMed home page under the Explore header, and at the bottom of every PubMed page.
• (Optional) MeSH Tutorial

3. (Optional) After you have completed a search,use the PubMed Filters, located on the left side of your search results page. They include Results by Year, Publication Dates, Text Availability, Article Attribute, Article Types, Article Language, Species, Sex, Ages and Other.

• When filters are selected a “Filters applied” message will display on the results page.
• Once you select a filter, it stays on until you turn it off, or you start a new search session on another day. To turn off filters, click either the “Clear all” link to remove all the filters, uncheck the individual filter, or click on the "Clear applied filters" button.

How to filter to Reviews, and by Publication Date

1. Under the "Publication Date" header, click in the box to the left of "10 years." The screen will change.
2. Under the "Article Type" header, click in the box to the left of "Review." The screen will change, and Review results will be displayed.

How to filter to a Classical Article and other types of articles

1. Click on the "See all article type filters" link, as illustrated above, and the Article Type popup window will open. 
2. Click in the box to the left of Classical Article
3. Click on the Apply button

5. Now Classical Article article type filter is activated. It is also a new article type category in the filters list. 

6. You can add more article types by selecting the types you want, and then and click on the "Apply" button. Uncheck the box to the left of it to deactivate it. 

• Below is a list of potentially relevant article types:
  • Classical Article -- also known as a seminal article. (full definition)
  • Quantitative article types: Clinical Trial, Controlled Clinical Trial, Multicenter Study, Pragmatic Clinical Trial, Randomized Controlled Trial, and Validation Study,
  • Review article types: Meta-Analysis, Review, and Systematic Review

For more information on article types/publication types see the publication characteristics (publication types) - scope notes page (from the National Library of Medicine).