Search PubMed

Two ways in, chosen with the pills at the top: One line takes PubMed syntax as you write it, Blocks builds the query a concept at a time. Blocks has its own page.

The filters

They sit in a panel that is always open, because a filter you cannot see is a filter you forget.

★ Recent reviews

A bundle, not a button. While it is on, these are the filters and the controls below show what it set:

Last 10 years · full text · English · humans · and the publication types PubMed calls reviews and syntheses.

Switch it off and the controls unlock at those same values, so changing one thing does not mean rewriting the other five. ↺ Clear all turns everything off, date limit included.

Last N years

0 means no date limit at all. Not fifty years, not a hundred: none.

Study design filters (ISSG)

Published search filters from the InterTASC Information Specialists' Sub-Group. They catch a kind of publication by the words it uses, not a subject, and go in AND with your terms. Four are available: guidelines broad, guidelines standard, meta-analysis and systematic reviews.

Two filters for the same idea

Article types and an ISSG filter both narrow to reviews, and they do it differently: article types use the publication type NLM assigned, ISSG uses the words the paper itself uses. Joined with AND, only what satisfies both survives — usually far fewer results than you meant. The app says so when you turn both on. Pick one approach.

In the sidebar

Four things are settings rather than filters, so they live in the sidebar and stay put: how many records to download, what to skip because it is already known, and whether to enrich with Semantic Scholar and Unpaywall.

Filtering the results

Once results are in, ⚙ Filter these results narrows what is shown without asking PubMed anything again. Every facet carries the count from these very records:

• Status — new, already in the archive, already screened
• Article type — the publication types NLM gave these records
• Journal quartile — including Not in SCImago
• Words in title or abstract
• Published between — the range of the records you actually have
• At least this many citations
• Only free full text — if Unpaywall was asked

A line under the panel says Showing 15 of 200. What you save, add to a list or add to a draft is what you can see: a tick left on a record the filter is hiding does not come along.

What happens to a search

Every search is logged with its terms, its query and how many it found — 🕘 Recent searches at the bottom. A search can be attached to a draft, so the article records where its bibliography came from.