MEDLINE, PubMed & Medical Subject Headings (MeSH): Advanced Search

Field searching turns off Automatic Term Mapping and forces PubMed to search for your exact terms in the fields you specify.

The Search Builder, a tool on the Advanced Search screen, streamlines more complex field searches. Use its drop down menus to select from over 35 field qualifiers, e.g., institutional Affiliation, Author, Grant Number, Journal,  Investigator, Title.

Citation Sensor

Finding the citation for a specific article is a common reason for using PubMed. Fortunately, PubMed's "citation sensor" works in the background to detect terms characteristic of citation searching, such as author names, journal titles, publication dates and article titles. Often you only need to type part of the citation, or as much as you know (e.g. katayama cell 2006), into the query box to find the article.

Single Citation Matcher

When the "citation sensor" doesn't work, the Single Citation Matcher provides a quick way to retrieve a few citations. It is linked on the PubMed home page under PubMed Tools. 

The Single Citation Matcher is like the Search Builder on the Advanced Search page, but with a form just for finding citations. Just enter the information you know into appropriate fields. Be sure to use the PubMed auto-suggested options for Journal and Author Name fields.  

Use the Search History tool, found on the Advanced search page, to rerun or combine searches.

The History shows:

• The Search number, which is also a link with options for adding the search to the Builder, showing the Search details, and more.
• An option to Add to the search Builder at the top of the page.
• The search Query.
• The number of Items found.
• The Time the search was run.

Rerun a search by clicking on the Items found number.

To combine searches, click the Search number to open a menu. Select the appropriate operator: AND, OR or NOT. PubMed will send that search to the Search Builder.

Scenario: You want to review the articles written by Dr. Ken Davis, President and CEO of The Mount Sinai Medical Center. Your PubMed search for Davis K retrieves over 2,500 articles.<

Open the Advanced Search screen by clicking the link below the PubMed query box.

• Use the Search Builder pull-down menu to change from All Fields to Affiliation. Enter Mount Sinai.
   
• Next, change the pull-down menu below from All Fields to Author. 
   
• Start typing "Davis", and select Davis K from the autocomplete list that appears. ( Author, Journal and MeSH fields include an autocomplete feature.) 
   
• Leave the default AND operator unchanged and Search. You should retrieve about 140 articles.