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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.
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.
Other filters can be added by clicking the Additional Filters button. This reveals a set of most commonly used filters, namely: ARTICLE LANGUAGE (English, Spanish), SPECIES, SEX, AGE, OTHER. Each filter type has a list of most commonly used options, although others are available by clicking on See all....
For example, click on "See all age filters".
This reveals additional age categories that you can add to the list of available filters. Tick the box next to "Adolescent: 13-18 years", and click Apply.
This action has two results: the category "Adolescent: 13-18 years" is added to the available filters list on the left, and the filter is directly applied to your results. You can see that the filter has been applied as there is a message at the top of the results: "Filters applied: Adolescent: 13-18 years. Clear all"
When you set filters, they will remain active until you click Clear All, at the top of your results or Clear applied filters, bottom left under the filters list. Alternatively, you can untick one of the boxes to undo the application of an unwanted filter. Click on Reset all filters at the bottom left of the page to clear all the filters you have added, and bring the list back to default.
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’:
