Speech Pathology & Audiology

By Subject

The National Library of Medicine recommends searching using entry terms without using punctuation or Boolean operators, at least to start with. This is because PubMed uses an algorithm called Automatic Term Mapping to link your plain-language search terms to related terms and Medical Subject Headings used for indexing in MEDLINE. That said, by default PubMed will link your concepts together using the logic of the Boolean operator AND, so if you are looking to use OR or NOT, go ahead and include them.

You can search using MeSH terms as well, but you will likely retrieve fewer results than if you use plain-language keywords because of the way ATM works. To understand how PubMed runs your search, you can click "advanced" under the search bar, and then click the carat to the left of your search terms under "History and Search Details."

By PMID

The PubMed ID or PMID is a unique identifier assigned to each PubMed citation. If you know the PMID of the citation you're looking for, you can enter it into the search bar. If you are only searching for one PMID, you can enter just the numerical values or the entire "PMID:XXX" string and it should automatically open the citation in abstract view. If you are searching for multiple PMIDs at once, use only the numerical values, do not include the letters "PMID" and separate the entries with a space.

 

By Citation

If you already have a complete or partial reference, you can use it to locate a specific citation. Enter the title of the article or bibliographic details like the author's name, the journal name, and the year of publication. A more common author's name will likely retrieve multiple results, while a less common name may only retrieve one result. If only one result is found, PubMed will automatically open the citation in abstract view.

You can also utilize the PubMed Single Citation Matcher.

By Author

The most comprehensive way to search for an author is to use the format:

Last Name <space> First Initial.

Once you've identified a citation, you can open it in abstract view to see a list of authors and their affiliations. You can use the "+ expand" button to see the affiliations of all authors at once. Click on the hyperlinked author's name to open a search using PubMed's computed author sort, which is an algorithm which ranks results by the authors of the same name by assessing similarity based on author affiliation and topic.

 

By Journal

You can search PubMed for only citations within a certain publication, but it is recommended that you use one of two identifiers:

• The MEDLINE title abbreviation
• The ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) with dashes

If you would like to use the journal title, use the advanced search to select the field "Journal," or type your search as "JOURNAL FULL TITLE"[journal]

By Phrase

It is generally assumed that using quotation marks around a phrase made up of two or more terms will only retrieve results where the words appear together in sequence. PubMed operates a bit differently though, it has an index of phrases, so if your phrase is not in the index your quotation marks will be ignored and the search will be run by searching each individual word in all fields. To bypass this and ensure your search only retrieves results where the words appear in sequence, you can use a proximity search with a distance of 0, by using the tag: [tiab:~0]

Clinical Queries

The PubMed Clinical Queries tool employs predetermined filters to allow quick and simple access to high-quality research that is especially applicable for Evidence Based Practice. These preset search filters can be viewed by clicking "Clinical Queries filter details" or "See filter details."

 

More Information

For more information about using PubMed, see these resources:

PubMed is a database of citations, meaning that PubMed holds the bibliographic information about articles, but not the full text of the article. That said, some items held in PubMed have links out to the full-text article.

PubMed has a filter on the left-hand side of the search results page that can help you limit by text availability.

Abstract: You may think that every citation on PubMed would include an abstract, but if an abstract was not provided to PubMed, one will not be available.

Free full text: These citations include links to a free version of the article, whether it is available for free from the publisher or as a free article hosted in PubMed Central, or both.

Full text: These citations include links to the full-text article, which may or may not be available for free depending on whether or not Ball State has access to it. If you come across something you can't access, contact a librarian.

 

LibKey Nomad:

If you have the LibKey Nomad plugin installed, you should see additional buttons in the PubMed search results for "Article Link," "View Complete Issue," "Access Options," or "Download PDF." 

If you are redirected to a OneSearch record, scan through the record to see if there are links to online full-text options. Otherwise, you can use the link for "Request the item with Interlibrary Loan / ILLiad."