In PubMed: Part 1, I explained why using PubMed to search for answers to medical questions is helpful. Now I'll describe how to use its advanced search functionality as I promised.
The default search form is located at the top of the page and looks like this:
When you click on "Advanced", you get this form:
Clicking on either of the "All Fields" menus will give you the same choices:
Say I want to look up articles which studied yoga. I could type "yoga" in the input field and click on the Search button but that would give me the same results as the default form.
Click on the image above for the latest results. It changes as more articles are added to the PubMed database.
As I scroll down, I see a result titled, "Humor":
Humor? I click on it and get this:
The term "yoga" is not in the title and it's not even in the abstract. While the article appears to be interesting and fun, I really just want to see articles specifically studying yoga. So this time, I'm going to use the advanced features and click "Title" in the first All Fields dropdown menu.
When I click the Search button, only articles with the word "yoga" in the title are listed. Click on the image above to see for yourself.
Wow. My resulting search yields 1,381 articles. I like yoga but that's a lot. I think I just want the ones which were published this year.
So I go back to the advanced search form and use the second All Fields dropdown menu. There are several fields for a date search. I choose the "Date - Publication" one.
When I choose it, I get two date fields:
I type "2014/01/01" in the first date field and "2014/12/31" in the second one:
I could've typed in "present" in the second date field instead of entering a date. When I do that, I receive results for articles published in 2015. Since today is Dec 19, 2014, it feels like a time machine. Note how a third All Fields dropdown menu appears in case my search isn't narrow enough. I click on the Search button before deciding that.
This time I get 204 results. Now that's doable. If you click on the image above, you'll see what I mean.
Once you're comfortable using PubMed's advanced search, you'll start to notice some of the goodies. Remember the image with 2,825 results? On the right, you'll see the graph, "Results by year":
The graph shows how many of the articles listed in your search were published in a given year ordered by year ascending. As the graph shows, more and more labs are studying yoga each year. "Download CSV" means you can download the CSV (Comma Separated Values) data used for the graph. You can open CSV files in a spreadsheet application like Excel or Numbers.
Under the graph is another goody. "Related searches" lists search terms which you might find helpful in your quest for knowledge.
Another useful goody is the "History" of your searches. You can find this on either the advanced search form or in the lower right of your search results where it's listed as "Recent Activity".
There are more PubMed goodies, but I left them for you to discover for yourself. Happy searching!