 Hi, I'm Julie Nanavati. A clinical informationist at the Welch Medical Library, and today we're going to learn a little bit about PubMed. PubMed is a database produced by the National Library of Medicine, or NLM, and it's one of the largest biomedical databases out there. PubMed provides free access to Medline, the National Library of Medicine's database of citations and abstracts from around the world, and it covers fields such as medicine, public health, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, healthcare systems, and pre-clinical sciences. The National Library of Medicine began indexing biomedical literature in 1879. This literature was once a printed index of articles called index medicis, but in 1960 it became one of the earliest available online sources for high quality information, but was only searchable for a fee. In 1996, free access to Medline was made available to the public online through PubMed. People often ask, what's the difference between PubMed and Medline? We hear both terms so often it's easy to think that they are one and the same, but actually they're not. As mentioned a moment ago, Medline is a database of journal citations and abstracts for biomedical literature. Citations in Medline are reviewed for accuracy in our index using specialized subject headings that are known as controlled vocabulary or MESH, which stands for Medical Subject Headings. The citations are also indexed using information such as publication types and substance names. PubMed is a tool that allows the Medline database to be searchable. Medline, however, is also available through numerous other search services that license the data such as Ovid, EBSCO, and Elsevier. The main difference between accessing Medline through PubMed versus through the other services is that PubMed is free to use, whereas there is a fee associated with using the others. If you're part of a university, this fee is usually paid for by the university's library and then the services are made available to you through the library's website. Most of the citations that you'll find in PubMed are from the Medline database, but it also contains citations to a small selection of NCBI books and citations that are ahead of print. In addition, PubMed includes a set of citations that don't come from the Medline journals, but are also considered important to health science research. There are records and population studies, health service research, space medicine, and AIDS to name a few of the specialized collections. Let's shift gears for just a minute and take a look at PubMed. On the home page, you'll see a Google Lights search bar. You can use this to begin your search, or you can also click on the advance link to get to a more sophisticated search page. When you search PubMed, the results are called records. These records include citation information and when available and abstract. They also contain a list of medical subject headings, mesh, that apply to the record. Something important to remember is that PubMed does not provide the full text of articles. If the article is freely available from the publisher, PubMed provides this link. While you're a student, if you access PubMed through the Welch Library, you will also see links provided to the library to journals to which Hopkins subscribes. Before we conclude this PubMed lecture, let's talk briefly about PubMed's vocabulary. The power and beauty of PubMed lies in its use of controlled vocabulary. Mesh is the authority list of the vocabulary terms used to index articles inside the database. Even though it stands for medical subject headings, it's more than just a source of medical terms. In fact, it would be even more appropriate if it was called biomedical subject headings because it also contains standardized terminology for the basic biological sciences. This includes terms for genes, proteins, biological processes, and much more. If you're curious to learn more about mesh and how it works, visit the National Library Medicine's website where you can go through their in-depth tutorial. The last thing to mention in this introduction is that PubMed includes a wide range of additional tools that you can explore. The clinical queries tool and the citation matcher are just two of them that are extremely helpful for searching more efficiently. That concludes this overview. If you are eager to learn more, PubMed provides a wide range of help materials from the home page. Here you can access tutorials, help guides, and FAQs that will enable you to search PubMed like a pro.