Example: Look for articles on the use of tamoxifen to treat breast cancer.

1. Run a search on breast neoplasms.

2. Then run a second search on tamoxifen.

Choose the History tab. You will see that search #1 is your breast neoplasms search and that search #2 is your tamoxifen search.

Note: Your number of results will be different because PubMed continually adds new citations to the database.

Run a search on #1 AND #2.

This will combine your two searches to find articles that match both these search criteria.

Tip: You can use OR with History in the same way as AND. This approach often generates many articles, and is best for comprehensive searching.

Tip: It's best to apply limits after building a good strategy that incorporates all of the concepts you wish to research, and combining those concepts with AND or OR.

Tip: Turn off limits for subsequent searches, by un-checking the box next to Limits. This box is checked whenever a limit is selected.

The National Library of Medicine's My NCBI system allows you to set up PubMed search filters so you can quickly retrieve articles of a specified type every time you run a search. To set up Filters, you must first register for an account with My NCBI.

Enter the author's last name, followed by the first and second initials, if known. Add the field designation for author [au]. For example, to find papers published by Dr. J. Michael Bishop, type bishop jm [au]. Capitalization is not important.

Tip: Initials are optional. If you do not know the author's middle initial or first name, you can run an author search on the last name only (e.g. prusiner [au]) or last name and first initial only (e.g. dracup k [au]).

Choose the Clinical Queries option in the PubMed@UCSF sidebar.

The Clinical Queries feature provides search filters for retrieving citations of clinical research articles, systematic reviews, and medical genetics.

Follow the simple instructions at the top of the Clinical Queries page.

If you only have partial citation information, Single Citation Matcher provides you a quick and easy way to find the record for a specific article.

Example: Look for a study about tobacco use among teens in New Hampshire that was published in the latest issue of JAMA. No author, volume, issue, or page numbers were given.

Choose the Single Citation Matcher in the PubMed sidebar.

Enter the information you have in the Citation Matcher form.

Choose the Search button to run the search and retrieve the citation.

Tip: Use Citation Matcher as a quick way to do an author search or title word search.

Each citation has a link to Related Articles that will retrieve a pre-calculated set of PubMed citations that are closely related to the selected article.

Choose Related Articles to the right of a citation to display the related set of articles.

[more about Related Articles]

Go to PubMed@UCSF or continue with this QuickGuide - [Alert Services]