Brief Guide to Using HINARI/PubMed
This brief HINARI/PubMed guide uses the slides and notes from the HINARI Short Course
(www.who.int/hinari/training ). We will complete several searches to display the features of
HINARI/PubMed. This is a database of approximately 21,000,000 biomedical citations and abstracts.
Maintained by the National Library of Medicine (USA), PubMed indexes over 5,500 biomedical journals
from throughout the world. It is an excellent tool to search for identifying articles on specific subjects and
linking to the full-text articles available from HINARI and also free full text (Open Access) publishers.
Note – in order to have access to the full-text articles, you must login to HINARI and click on the Search
inside HINARI full-text using PubMed link. For more information on HINARI/PubMed, go to Module 4
on the Training Page - www.who.int/hinari/training/module_4_PubMed/en/index.html
After clicking on the Search inside HINARI full-text using PubMed link, this page will display. Most of
the explanatory information will be in the boxes within each slide.
We have begun a malaria infections AND Africa search as a means of displaying the various features of
HINARI/PubMed. As the slide notes, there are two invaluable filters – to Free Full Text and HINARI
articles. You must go to the Abstract display setting to access the full-text articles. Note the search
results number 4849 articles.
In the initial Summary display, you can open full text articles for Free Article(s) and Free PMC
(PubMed Central) articles by clicking on the icons.
By opening the Display Setting drop down menu, you can choose options on Format, Items per Page and
Sort by. We will open the Abstract display. The Abstract option will display the icons that give you
access to full-text articles and also can use the free Full Text or HINARI filters. (From the Summary
display, you only can access free full text articles but not the HINARI ones.)
Once in the Abstract display, you will see icons (HINARI and free full text) that would link you to the
article. If you have problems accessing a full-text article, go to the training page
(www.who.int/hinari/training/ ) and open the Access Problems and Solutions document in the Additional
Resources section.
If you are in HINARI/PubMed but don’t have the time to view the full-text articles (or want to keep a
record of the citations), you should save the search results and return to HINARI. Using the citations from
the search, you would look up the article via the journal title, issue number and pages – in the HINARI
Journals collection A-Z list. Options for this are available in the Send to drop down menu and we will
display examples for Send to File and E-mail options.
First, you must check the boxes of the articles you want to save. If you do not check boxes for individual
citations, 500 will be saved to the File or sent to your Email.
.We have opened the Send to drop down menu and chosen the File option.
Displayed is the .txt file that we have created.
.We have opened the Send to drop down menu and chosen the E-mail option.
PubMed displays that the E-mail message has been sent.
We have discussed the Send To File and E-mail options. Other useful ones include the Clipboard.
PubMed will save you search for up to 8 hours and the Collections option where you can save your search
to your MY NCBI account (see Module 4.5 - www.who.int/training/module_4_PubMed/en/index.html)
For more information on the PubMed Display settings and Send to features, go to Module 4.1 -
www.who.int/hinari/training/module_4_PubMed/en/index.html
Filters also is an invaluable tool to make a search more precise. In the following slides, we will review
some of the many options. Note the various options available in the filters column which is displayed after
a PubMed search is completed. Several can be applied simultaneously.
One of the most useful options is the Custom Date Range filter. This allows you to limit the search to the
most recently published material. We will complete a search for HIV AND pregnancy.
The original search results was over 14000 and, with this current year filter, now totals 679 citations.
.
This is an example of the HIV AND Pregnancy search with the Ages filter – Adolescent: 13–18 and
Young adults: 19-24. The search’s results with these filters is 3534 articles. Note that you first must click
on the specific limit or clear or clear all or the previous filters will be applied to the new search.
For the HIV AND Pregnancy search, we have cleared the other filters and clicked on some of the boxes of
the Article types filter – Practice Guidelines and Review. This option for specific types of research
articles is underutilized and invaluable.
Adding this set of filters has significantly decreased the number of citations – to two types of articles with
a total of 2301 articles. Again… remember that you first must click on the specific limit or clear or clear
all or all the previously applied filters will be applied to the new search.
PubMed’s filters is a valuable tool for making a search more precise. Once the filters are applied, you will
see your results in the Summary display. Remember that to access the HINARI full-text articles, you must
go to the Abstracts display. For more information on the PubMed Filters features, go to Module 4.2 -
www.who.int/hinari/training/module_4_PubMed/en/index.html Another means of using filters and other
search tools is by opening the Advanced Search option (at the top of the Search page). Information on this
option is in Module 4.3.
As previously noted, Modules 4.1-4.6 contains detailed information on many of the HINARI/PubMed
features - www.who.int/training/module_4_PubMed/en/index.html. Note Module 4.5 (MY NCBI) that
discusses how you can set up your own MY NCBI account and receive email updates on new articles for
searches that you have saved.
For more detailed training material on PubMed, you also can go to the PubMed Tutorial site –
www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmed.html
We have accessed the PubMed Online
Training page. There is a link to an
extensive PubMed Tutorial and numerous
Quick (animated) Tours on Searching
PubMed, Managing Results, MeSH and
MY NCBI plus Hot Topics.
Updated 2014 01
