Learning about high quality research for your diagnosis and potential cancer treatments will educate you about your situation and options. The goal is to find the best possible care. Many resources exist with cancer information about published cancer research studies. We explain how to use a free database called PubMed and provide other strategies to locate relevant cancer research. Additional resources for researching treatments are available in Top Cancer Resources.
What is PubMed?
PubMed is a free online database with published research from medical journals offering an excellent resource for scientific cancer information. The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a part of the National Institutes of Health, maintains PubMed with millions of citations.
How do I use PubMed?
NLM's PubMed Tutorial offers tips about how to use PubMed.
What is an example of searching PubMed for scientific cancer information, including cancer research?
We'll use the example of searching PubMed for information about lung cancer.
Searching Terms
Enter lung cancer into the PubMed search line and click on search.
As you will see, as of 2010, almost 200,000 results are listed. Searches for information about lung cancer can be narrowed in different way.
Using MESH Terms
MESH terms are PubMed's controlled vocabulary for indexing articles. Using MESH terms in your searches helps narrow results. For example, searching lung cancer produces more results than lung neoplasms. The goal is to narrow the search to list studies more specific to your topic, according to PubMed's database coding. The word neoplasm is the MESH term for cancer. Learn more about MESH terms and search the MESH database.
Since the MESH term for cancer is neoplasm, searching lung neoplasm instead of lung cancer narrows your search. Specific types of lung cancer can also be searched such as non small cell lung neoplasm or small cell lung neoplasm.
Insert search words containing the cancer information you need. Some examples for non small cell lung cancer might include non small cell lung neoplasm AND surgery, non small cell lung neoplasm AND radiation, non small cell lung cancer neoplasm AND chemotherapy, and non small cell lung neoplasm AND side effects.
If these instructions seem confusing, search the terms that make sense to you. For example, if you search non small lung cancer chemotherapy, PubMed will list results. However, the results are not as focused to your topic compared to other searches listed here.
Other strategies for narrowing the search even more include lung neoplasm AND female or lung neoplasm AND male. You can also narrow your search to female or male through Limits.
Using Limits
Above the search bar is a link called Limits. Click on it. In Limits, you can choose to further narrow your search through when the study was published, the type of article, human or animal studies (we recommend that you focus on human studies), languages, gender, ages, and more.
Review and Free Full Text
On the near upper right side of your screen, under Filter your results, you will find All, Review, and Free Full Text. Click on Review to access all of the review articles. Systematic reviews usually focus on a clinical topic to answer a specific question and include a high level of scientific evidence. Learn more about the hierarchy of research studies in Evidence-Based Medicine. Also click on Free Full Text to access free full text articles of interest.
What is the difference between an abstract on PubMed and the full text article?
Abstracts listed on PubMed are summaries of published research studies and/or article content. Whenever possible, it is important to read the full text article and not only rely on the abstract section of a published study. Abstracts provide limited information and sometimes not completely consistent with all corresponding data in the article.
What are the limitations of PubMed?
Although free, PubMed does not include abstracts for all published research studies. Most full text articles also need to be purchased from the journal directly.
What are some other strategies to locate relevant cancer research?
- Google and Google Scholar
- You may be surprised about what you find through searching in Google! Try searching concepts, synonyms, narrower terms, and broader terms, as well as writing your topic statement as a question. You may also find some full text articles through Google.
- Journals & Articles (free)
- Journals specific to integrative cancer care and integrative health care (free abstracts; fee based full text articles and subscriptions)
- Journals focused on cancer care and health care
- Annals of Oncology
- BMC Cancer
- Breast Cancer Research
- British Journal of Cancer
- British Medical Journal
- European Journal of Cancer
- European Journal of Cancer Care
- Journal of the National Cancer Institute
- Journal of Clinical Oncology
- Journal of the American Medical Association
- New England Journal of Medicine
- Many others
- Databases (fee based to access)
- AMED Allied and Complementary Medicine, Alt HealthWatch, Medline, Embase, PsychINFO, and other databases list some published cancer and integrative cancer studies not available through PubMed. More information about these databases and others is available through Ovid.
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