School of Dentistry - Clerkships & General Practice

Adapted from Boston University School of Medicine

What is PubMed? 

PubMed is the core source of biomedical literature citations. Always use links from UW Health Sciences Library website to access PubMed to connect with full text articles or request scans of articles not immediately available online.
 

How do I search PubMed? 

Step-by-step guidance, videos and more are available in the PubMed at the UW guide. 
 

Focused Searching: MeSH terms for Dentistry

When searching for the dental literature in PubMed, it can be helpful to include Medical Subject Headings (MeSH - learn more from PubMed at the UW) for dentistry in your search query. This is especially important if your research topic is looking at the intersection of a medical condition and dentistry. The following MeSH terms can be connected together using the boolean operator OR, followed by other search terms connected with AND to find the overlap.

• "Oral Health"[MeSH]
• "Dentistry"[MeSH]
• "Dental Health Services"[MeSH]

Example: ("Oral Health"[MeSH] OR "Dentistry"[MeSH] OR "Dental Health Services"[MeSH]) AND asthma
 

Filtered Searching: PubMed Dental Journals 

If you would like to narrow your search results down to the dental literature in PubMed, there's a filter for that! 

1. By default, PubMed does not show all of the filters at once, including journal categories. Click on the link "show additional filters" to see what else is available.

2. Select "Journal categories" and then click Show. This will make the "Journal categories" filter available on the left-hand side.

3. Click on "Dental journals" to filter your results to dental publications.