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United States National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health

Welcome!

Welcome to the "PubMed Tutorial", the Web-based learning program that will show you how to search PubMed®, the National Library of Medicine (NLM®) journal literature search system.

Goals and Objectives

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

  • Understand PubMed's scope and content.
  • Understand how the MeSH vocabulary is used to describe and retrieve citations.
  • Build a search using MeSH and PubMed search tools (Details, Limits, History, etc.)
  • Manage your results using display, sort, the Clipboard, save, print, e-mail and order features and My NCBI filters.
  • Save your search strategies.
  • Link to full-text articles and other resources.
  • Use special queries and other PubMed/NCBI tools.

This tutorial was last updated in April 2009 and reflects functional changes to PubMed and My NCBI through March 2009, however not all animations have been updated to reflect display changes. To see a list of recent PubMed changes, go to PubMed's New/Noteworthy.

For brief tutorials on specific topics, see also the PubMed Quick Tours Quick Tour logo

System Requirements
The tutorial was designed to work on Windows® Operating Systems with Microsoft Internet Explorer® version 7+ or with Firefox version 3+, and works best on Macintosh® computers using Mozilla Firefox™ or Opera™ 8+. It contains animated demonstrations of procedures, for which you will need the Adobe® Flash™ player. The Flash player can be downloaded and installed at no cost from Adobe®. You may not be able to view the animated demonstrations if you are using another browser, such as Netscape version 6 on Windows or IE on Mac. For detailed documentation of the system requirements and known incompatibilities, please see the Tutorial FAQ.

Click Next to learn how to navigate through the modules of the PubMed Tutorial or click on PubMed Overview on the sidebar menu to jump right into learning about PubMed.

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Last reviewed: 28 April 2009
Last updated: 22 April 2009
First published: 20 March 2001
Metadata| Permanence level: Permanent: Dynamic Content