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PubMed

Guide to using PubMed.

What is PubMed?

PubMed is a free interface for searching MEDLINE, the most popular bibliographic database in the health and medical sciences. It contains references to millions of journal articles from biomedical journals and is updated daily.

Accessing PubMed

UCL staff and students should access PubMed via the UCL Library Services databases list in order to see Findit@UCL links to UCL subscribed journals:

Other users can access PubMed directly from the PubMed homepage:

Creating a NCBI account

You will need to have a NCBI (PubMed) account set up, if you wish to use features such as saving your search results within PubMed, or to create an alert or save a search.

You can set up an account using a 'partner organization' username and password, for example your UCL user ID and password or a Google account. Your NCBI account can be linked to multiple 'partner organizations' allowing different sign in options to the same account. You can link your account to your UCL login by choosing more login options and searching for 'UCL'.

Tip: If you create an NCBI account using a UCL login then we would advise adding an additional 'partner organization' as a login option, e.g. Google, Microsoft etc,  so that you can retain access to your NCBI account in the event that you leave UCL

To create an account (if you haven't already created one), use the following steps:

  1. At the top, right-hand side of the search screen, click on the Log in, button.
  2. At the bottom of the page, click on Sign up, next to 'New here?'.
  3. Use one of the listed 3rd-party login options, or to use your UCL credentials; click on more sign up options
  4. If you select more sign up options, find University College London in the list of participating institutions, and select it.
  5. Login with your UCL credentials.
  6. Finally, either create a new account, or link your login to an existing account. (You will need your 'old' NCBI username and password to link to an existing account.)