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PubMed

Sorting Search Results

Once you have entered search terms, you can sort them 3 different ways:Sorted By

  • Best Match (default option) - This is "based on an algorithm that analyzes each PubMed citation that includes the search terms. For each search query, "weight" is calculated for citations depending on how many search terms are found and in which fields they are found. In addition, recently-published articles are given a somewhat higher weight for sorting. The top articles returned by the weighted term frequency algorithm above are then re-ranked for better relevance by a new machine-learning algorithm. If any technical constraints prevent the machine-learning architecture from re-ranking the results, the sort will revert to the standard best match algorithm."
  • Most Recent - This is the date a record was initially added to PubMed, not the publication date.
  • Publication Date - The date that an article was published.

To change how your results are sorted, click on Display Options and choose from the "Sort by" dropdown menu.

Additionally, you can also change the number of items displayed per page and showing the entire abstract (as opposed to just the record summary).

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3827/

How do I highlight my search terms in PubMed?

How do I highlight my search terms in PubMed search results?

You can customize your search results in PubMed using your MyNCBI account. One particularly useful feature is the ability to highlight your search terms.

Sign in with your MyNCBI account and click on NCBI Site Preferences:

My NCBI Site Preferences

 

Under the Common Preferences section, you can change the highlighting color.

In the PubMed Preferences section, you can change how many search results are displayed on a single page, as well as what is actually displayed for each result and how the results are sorted.

  • The maximum number of search results that can be displayed on one page is 200.
  • Displaying the abstract is advantageous in that you do not have to open each record individually to view the abstract or access the link to the article. Additionally, search terms will also be highlighted in the abstracts of your search results.

PubMed - MyNCBI Common Preferences

 

 

 

Author & Journal Navigation

When viewing an article record, you can see that the journal title and author names are displayed with blue text:

PubMed article Record

The blue text is hyperlinked to actions in PubMed.

To retrieve all citations from the displayed journal, click the journal's name and the select Search in PubMed from the dropdown menu.

article record: journal title

When you click on an author's name, a PubMed search will be run automatically. Keep in mind that the results might include other authors with similar names, or that an author might be credited using other variations of their name.