This page will cover a selection of search features of PubMed. For more specific guidance, see PubMed's extensive user guide:
PubMed has a wide variety of search fields that you can limit your search to. A search that includes no search fields will default to searching All Fields [all]. The [all] field uses Automatic Term Mapping, which can be helpful to expand a search, but doesn't give you as precise a level of control over the search.
How do you specify a field to be searched? Just put the field code in brackets after the search term. For example, if you wanted to search for articles with anesthesia in the title:
"anesthesia"[ti]
To avoid accidental automatic mapping, put your search term in quotes. This means that if you have multiple words that you don't want searched as a phrase, each word will have to specify a field:
"anesthesia"[ti] AND "nursing"[ti]
instead of "anesthesia nursing"[ti]
You can specify different fields for different terms in the same search. For example, if you wanted to add a search for authors affiliated with Johns Hopkins to the previous search:
"anesthesia"[ti] AND "johns hopkins"[ad]
This is only a partial list of some of the more useful fields to search. A full list of search fields is available at the PubMed User Guide.
Title | [ti] | Citation title as well as collection title |
Title/Abstract | [tiab] | Citation title, abstract, and author keywords |
Text Words | [tw] | Everything in [tiab] plus MeSH terms, MeSH subheadings, publication types, substance names, personal name as subject, corporate cuthor, secondary source, and comment/correction notes |
Author | [au] | Author name in the format: last name followed by a space and up to the first two initials followed by a space and a suffix abbreviation, if applicable, all without periods or a comma after the last name (e.g., fauci as or o'brien jc jr) |
Journal | [ta] | Journal title abbreviation, full journal title, or ISSN/eISSN number |
MeSH terms | [mh] | MeSH terms field. Since this is a controlled vocabulary field, it is often best to add MeSH terms by looking them up in the MeSH Database, which allows you to add the terms directly to a PubMed search. |
If you are getting too many results, there are a number of ways to narrow your search:
"embolism"[tw]
→ "pulmonary embolism"[tw]
"embolism"[tw]
→ "embolism"[tw] AND "anesthesia"[tw]
If you are getting too few results, there are a number of ways to expand your search:
"pulmonary embolism"[tw]
→ "embolism"[tw]
"pulmonary embolism"[tw]
→ pulmonary embolism
pulmonary embolism
into the following search:"pulmonary embolism"[MeSH Terms] OR ("pulmonary"[All Fields] AND "embolism"[All Fields]) OR "pulmonary embolism"[All Fields]
(“Pulmonary Embolism”[Mesh] OR “Pulmonary Infarction”[Mesh] OR “pulmonary embolism”[tw] OR “pulmonary embolisms”[tw] OR “pulmonary infarct”[tw] OR “pulmonary infarcts”[tw] OR “pulmonary infarction”[tw] OR “pulmonary infarctions”[tw] OR “pulmonary thromboembolism”[tw] OR “pulmonary thromboembolisms”[tw])
AND "anesthesia"[tw]
)MeSH are the controlled vocabulary for MEDLINE, which is a database that is one of the major sources of content for PubMed. MEDLINE is also available at Dugan Library through EBSCO.
Controlled vocabulary (also know as subject headings or subject terms) are standardized terms applied to sources by human indexers or via automated indexing (the National Library of Medicine transitioned to automated indexing for MeSH in 2022).
For these reasons, the most comprehensive searches will generally use a mix of both MeSH terms and keywords.
There are a number of ways to make use of MeSH terms:
PubMed provides a search strategy that you can use to find systematic reviews on your topic. In your search, add the following:
systematic[sb]
This is a shortcut to instruct PubMed to add the following to your search:
For example, if you wanted to search for systematic reviews on pulmonary embolism, a basic search could be:
pulmonary embolism AND systematic[sb]
See other sections of this page for creating more sophisticated searches for concepts like pulmonary embolism.
Proximity searching allows you to search for a set of words within a given distance from each other. Searching just for keywords can fail because the words are not connected to each other. Phrase searching (using parentheses) can also fail in cases where the words can be in a variety of orders or cases where additional words may sometime be added within the phrase.
Proximity searching is only available in the title [ti] and title/abstract [tiab] fields. The formula is as follows, where the field is either [ti] or [tiab] and n is the number of words that can exist between the search terms:
"search terms"[field:~n]
"healthcare access"[tiab:~1]
finds both "healthcare access" and "access to healthcare."
"healthcare access"[tiab:~2]
additionally finds "access to the healthcare system," "access to standardized healthcare," and more, but will also pull in more irrelevant results that happen to have "healthcare" and "access" within two words of each other.
"patient physician relationship"[tiab:~0]
finds "patient-physician relationship" and "physician-patient relationship." Using ~0 for proximity means that no additional words can be added between the terms, but the terms can appear in any order.
PubMed provides documentation on a set of premade search strategies on a variety of topics:
Most of the listed search strategies can just be copied and pasted into a PubMed search, but PubMed also includes a couple of special search interfaces:
Health Services Research (HSR) Queries