Table of Contents

• About the tutorial & PubMed
• Basic searching
  by author
• Subject searching
• Viewing results &
  finding full text
• Using the search
  history
• Managing your
  search results

BioMolecular Chemistry 704

PubMed exercise

3. Subject Searching in PubMed

Subject searching in PubMed is generally very intuitive. This section focuses briefly on how to perform a search, and in more detail on how to frame your question, then narrow it for the best results.

For a subject search, enter one or more words into the search box and click on Go. (See screen shot, below.) PubMed automatically combines your terms with “AND” so that all terms or concepts are present in your results list.

Framing Your Question

When searching for articles on a particular subject, it’s a good idea to try to format your problem as a question, then break down the question into understandable concepts and search for those concepts.

For example: You have a patient prone to migraines. You’re considering prescribing sumatriptan as treatment. Your patient has heard something (but she can’t remember what) about some severe reactions to sumatriptan, so would like you to do some more research before she agrees to take it.

Before beginning your PubMed search:

1. Frame your question: “What are the adverse effects of sumatriptan?”
2. Break the question into the main subjects: Sumatriptan AND adverse effects
3. Enter the terms into your PubMed search box
4. Hit Go.

Your search retrieves over 600 citations (see below)—more than you care to review at the moment.

You can now try to apply some limits to the search. Click on the Limits tab (circled above). On this screen you can limit your search by gender, if applicable, age group, publication type, and publication date, among other choices. For our search, we’re interested in English language articles as well as studies done on humans, so we select those limits, and hit Go to run the search. We still retrieve over 500 citations.

When You Get Too Much: Reframing the Question

At this point you may want to think about your question and decide if there’s a concept you’ve missed. You realize that your patient asked not only whether there were adverse effects, but if there are any reasons that she shouldn’t take this medication.

In other words, are there any contraindications to her use of sumatriptan?

We now return to our search, and add “AND contraindications” to the search box. Note that the Limits box is checked—our Human/English limit will remain in place until we uncheck the box.

We get 19 citations. The third, by Vanmolkot et. al., is "Acute effects of sumatriptan on aortic blood pressure, stiffness, and pressure waveform." Your patient has hypertension, so you immediately click on the authors names to open and read the abstract and find that "significant vascular effects were already detected after the lowest dose of sumatriptan."

Proceed to Section 4: Viewing results and finding full text