PubMed Shortcuts
PubMed indexes ~37 million biomedical citations. NLM-maintained, free, the canonical literature search. The trick to using it at the bedside is pre-built filters.
- PubMed home
- PubMed Clinical Queries — pre-built filters for therapy/diagnosis/etiology/prognosis with broad/narrow toggles.
- PubMed Advanced Search — MeSH terms, field tags, boolean.
- MeSH Browser — controlled vocabulary; lets you search by concept, not just word.
Pre-baked bedside searches
Type a topic and the links update live. Optional toggles narrow the result set to a pediatric or pregnancy population.
Links open a PubMed result list; with no topic they fall back to the unfiltered filter view.
Specialty-focused searches
- Pediatrics journal — current issue
- JAMA Pediatrics — current issue
- NEJM — current issue
- Annals of Internal Medicine — current issue
Useful PubMed features
- Find similar articles — every record has a “Similar articles” link in the sidebar.
- My NCBI — save searches; opt into email alerts for new hits on a query.
- Cited by — back-link from a paper to everything that has subsequently cited it.
- LinkOut — go straight to free full text where available (PMC, journal site).
Free full-text complements
- PMC (PubMed Central) — NIH free full-text archive.
- Europe PMC — broader full-text coverage of European journals.
- Bookshelf — full textbooks (e.g., LactMed lives here).