What Is PubMed?

PubMed’s free search connects users with the latest biomedical research literature. Anyone can use the search to find articles—patients, doctors, nurses, health workers, or researchers.

The simplest way to search PubMed is through keywords, similar to how you would search Google. For example, searching “diabetes” (without quotes) brings up 1,056,371 results at the time of writing. In PubMed, each result is the abstract of an article. For some articles, the full text is also freely available on PubMed Central.

How Is PubMed Used?

PubMed is the world’s most popular biomedical database. In 2023, it managed 3.66 billion searches. PubMed is used all over the world. It is also popular in many countries outside the US because it is free to use and provides free access to high-quality scholarship.

PubMed is the go-to search interface for many health-care workers. When they want to start a new research project, see what other hospitals are doing about an issue, or research a disease, PubMed is the place to start. Because PubMed is a reliable and broad source of information, it acts as one-stop shopping for health-care research.

PubMed is also used for patient care when doctors need to research an unusual condition or presentation they haven’t seen before. A quick review of the literature may be helpful to see what has been done or what is new.

Medical librarians rely heavily on PubMed for their work. They run searches in the database to answer patrons' questions and teach people how to use it more effectively.

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How Do Librarians Maintain PubMed?

PubMed is a product of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world’s largest biomedical library. NLM is part of the National Institutes of Health, an agency within the federal US government. Librarians, staff, and NLM put a ton of work into maintaining PubMed, as might be expected for a site that receives billions of searches a year.

For a journal to be listed as part of PubMed MEDLINE, it must go through vetting by NLM for quality and reliability. This ensures the quality of the results found in PubMed.

Once a journal is listed, the individual articles must be cataloged—that is, all of the information must be collected to give each article its own page. This includes separate categories for details like the author of the piece, the type of article (for example, review, clinical trial, or case report), and complete citation information. 

The subject terms, which describe the topics covered in the article, are among the most important pieces of information. NLM calls these “MESH” terms—Medical Subject Headings. The subject terms help categorize the article. For example, if I want to find articles on fibromyalgia, I can search for the related MESH term to view all the articles categorized this way. Subject terms organize the database and help researchers find all the articles on a single topic.

Moreover, NLM employs systems librarians and technical staff to continue updating PubMed’s features and interface. One cool technical feature of PubMed is called “Automatic Term Mapping”: PubMed will try to automatically restructure your simple search to take advantage of its advanced searching features.

Finally, all of this work on PubMed is only worthwhile if people know how to use it. NLM invests a lot of work in teaching people to use PubMed, for example, through online tutorials and webinars. Advanced training is given to medical librarians across the country so they can learn how to use PubMed’s newest features and, in turn, spread information to their patrons. 

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Why Is PubMed Important?

PubMed provides free access to high-quality, scholarly biomedical information to everyone. It is part of the infrastructure of evidence-based medicine and medical research across the country. It’s a public good maintained by medical librarians who are part of our federal government.

It’s also a huge success—how many government databases get billions of searches per year and have become the default in their fields worldwide?!

PubMed shows the power of excellent medical librarianship.

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