What is the PubMed Platform?

PubMed Official Homepage

For the Health Sciences, the librarians regularly stress the value of the PubMed database platform. What is PubMed? According to the About page:

PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM's legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC is part of the NLM collection, which also includes NLM's extensive print and licensed electronic journal holdings and supports contemporary biomedical and health care research and practice as well as future scholarship.

Available to the public online since 2000, PMC was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NLM.

In other words, PubMed offers value to student researchers in a few important areas:

As a search platform it is free and relatively straightforward to use.
It connects to the citations/abstracts of many publications in biomedical/life sciences literature, some of which is published as "open access," or freely available to researchers.
It has been available since 2000 and continues to evolve to meet current research/technology needs.
It offers a citation generator that allows for quicker citing of articles.

PubMed Video Tutorial

While the best way to learn the PubMed platform is by searching within it, we realize it might be helpful to see some examples in a tutorial. Please explore PubMed on your own following the tutorial to gain a firmer understanding of the ins and outs. And remember that no one expects you to be an expert in PubMed! As mentioned, it does continue to evolve and change over time.