The PubMed database, developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), contains more than 34 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature.
It does not include full text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website or PubMed Central (PMC). NYU Langone affiliates who connect to PubMed through the NYU Health Sciences Library can also get access to full text articles from the Library’s subscriptions.
PubMed includes citations from three different National Library of Medicine resources. MEDLINE is comprised of citations from journals that have been selected for inclusion and indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). PubMed Central (PMC) contains publically available full text articles archived by the National Library of Medicine. These include peer reviewed journal articles and author-submitted manuscripts, as well as preprints. PubMed also includes citations from Bookshelf, an archive of books and documents related to life sciences and healthcare. An unfiltered search in PubMed may retrieve citations from all three resources.
Through the NYU Health Sciences Library, you can access MEDLINE records through both PubMed and Ovid. Due to differences in interface and structure, identical searches in both databases may yield different results. These can be due to a number of factors:
PubMed applies automatic term mapping to searches, leading to higher sensitivity of results. For searches requiring more precision and control, Ovid MEDLINE may be preferred, or automatic term mapping can be disabled in PubMed by using search field tags.