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PubMed offers a wide range of in-built filters that can be applied to limit your search. For example, the language filter is a useful way to quickly limit articles to those where the full text article will be written in English.
It's worth noting that some PubMed filters, such as the 'Humans' filter, will limit your results to only those articles that have been fully indexed with MeSH. Using these filters can therefore mean that you miss relevant articles that have not been indexed, and so your search may not be comprehensive.
PubMed filters that are not based on MeSH include the Publication date and Language filters. For systematic or comprehensive searches in PubMed use caution when using any other in-built PubMed filters as these most likely rely on MeSH indexing.
PubMed's Clinical Queries feature includes some additional, sophisticated search filters.
Once you have your search results you can apply filters to limit your search. A selection of filters is displayed on the left hand side of the screen. Other filters can be added by clicking the Additional Filters button.
For a set year limit, scroll down to Publication Date and select either the last 1, 5 or 10 years. Alternatively, use the Results by Year filter by dragging the circle(s) to the years you are looking for. If you hover on each bar of the graph, you can see how many publications there were for each year.
Tick the box next to Review to filter your results to review articles.
To apply an age filter, select Additional Filters, choose Age and select the options that you wish to add to your search screen e.g. ‘65+ years’. Selecting specific age options and clicking Show in the dialogue box will add the filter to the left hand side of your search screen.
Once the filter is on your search screen, tick the box by it to filter your search results.
When you set filters, they will remain active until you click Clear All, at the top of your results or Reset all filters at the left of the page.
Make sure to clear your filters when starting a new search.
If you are using PubMed and you would like to go beyond the in-built filters then you can take advantage of other pre-designed search filters such as those available on the ISSG search filter resource. These search filters are search strategies designed to capture articles on particular topics or methodologies.
Speak to a librarian to get advice on using these search filters.
You can also add a filter to limit the results to systematic review.
The filter is on the left hand side of the screen. Scroll down to ‘Article Type’ and tick the box ‘Systematic Review’:
