Library Homepage: Nursing Programs: PubMed for Nurses

What is PubMed?

What is PubMed and When Should I Use It?

PubMed is a free resource that can be used to find citations for biomedical and life sciences literature. It contains more than 33 million citations and abstracts.

PubMed can be an extremely useful tool but to get the most out of your search, it's important to know when and how to use it. Remember that it is a database of citations, not a database of full-text articles.

Pubmed is good for

Finding citations of all the research published on a particular topic (e.g. literature reviews)
Finding a researcher's publication records
Keeping up to date on recent publications on a topic

Tutorials for Using PubMed

PubMed for Nurses Tutorial
This brief tutorial, designed specifically for nurses, provides an introduction to searching the biomedical journal literature using PubMed. Watch the video then complete the quiz or exercise to test your knowledge.
PubMed Biomedical Index
Biomedical index through the National Library of Medicine that provides citations for biomedical literature. A good source of abstracts for validated measurement tools. Not a source of full-text content or of research instruments.
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Find Specific Test instrument name or acronym, scale, observation, questionnaire, etc.
Find Test for a Variable by keyword and additional keywords or Medical Subject Heading (MESH)
Find Test Reviews Use keywords such as validity, reliability or use MeSH terms such as validation studies[pt], validation studies as topic[mh], reproducibility of results[mh]
PubMed Central (PMC)
Open Access (free) nursing and healthcare journals indexed in PubMed.