RefNavigator Blog

Here are two small but useful Pubmed tips:

(1)   How to locate Pubmed website

At first I always use URL http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ to access Pubmed. It’s a little difficult to remember- actually sometimes I need to google “Pubmed” to find the URL address.

Tips: there is another simple URL: www.pubmed.org. Obviously it’s much easier to remember.

 (2)   “AND” is different to “and”

On Pubmed website, all search terms will be converted to lower cases by default. In other words, it’s same to search “cdna” or “CDNA”. But it does apply to logic operators.

For example, the following two queries will return different results:

• “cdna and mrna”
• “adna AND mrna”

The first query, “cdna and mrna”, actually will search in all fields for three words “adna”, “and” and “mrna. While the second query, “adna AND mrna” is really what you want. Pubmed will look for those articles that all fields include “adna” and “mrna”.

Yes, what I want to say is, always use upper cases “AND” “OR” when you try to connect different search terms.