Searching the Medical Literature

If you want to do some research in the medical literature, you can use the National Library of Medicine's Medline database. Medline includes over 11 million citations to articles in about 4500 medical journals from 1966 to the present. The site I use to access Medline for free is Entrez PubMed. The PubMed database includes the Medline database, plus some additional citations. Entrez is the name of the search and retrieval system used by PubMed.

On the PubMed website, you can search by author, article title, journal, or keywords. Many articles have abstracts that you can view online. If you want to see the full text, you can sometimes find a free source listed on PubMed. If you can't find a free source, you can order the full text for a fee. You can also check your local University medical library. Many of these libraries let members of the public make a limited number of visits per year. You can't take books out, but you can photocopy a few articles while you're there.