How to Search PubMed in HINARI

Transcript of video:
Using PubMed through HINARI can help you find articles on a topic and connect to HINARI or other free full text versions of them quickly.
PubMed is the US National Library of Medicine’s search engine for the MEDLINE database. It searches over 20 million citations to journal articles in medicine, basic sciences, nursing, dentistry, and related biomedical fields.
HINARI links to a special version of PubMed that makes it easier to find full text articles in HINARI and articles that are available for free on the Internet. Let’s click on this link to open PubMed.
The example topic is malaria.
Type a term into the search box. As you type, terms other people have searched for appear below. These are not recommended or preferred terms, so it is best to ignore these. Click search.
This search was very broad and retrieved many results. PubMed has many citations, so it helps to be specific. For example, if I am treating pregnant patients with malaria, then I could improve my search by adding AND pregnancy after the initial search term. This refines our search toward our topic.
Note that using AND between search terms narrows your search to only those citations that have both concepts. Using OR between search terms broadens your search to retrieve citations with either concept.
Once you have a set of articles on your topic, use filters to refine your results more. Filters appear to the left of results.
I can narrow my search by date (such as the last 5 years), publication type (such as clinical trials), and even patient characteristics. More filters are available by clicking show additional filters, for example age. If we were interested in articles on effects of maternal malaria on infants, we would choose the infant filter. If we want articles on malaria in either mothers or infants, we could check limits for adults and infants.
Be careful not to choose full text or free full text yet. Choosing these may remove some of the articles that you could get through HINARI.
I now have results that are clinical trials from the last ten years about malaria and pregnancy in adults and newborns.
The default view for results is called the Summary view, and lists only the basic information about the article. If you would like to read more, click on the article title. This will take you to the abstract, if it is available.
This view also shows you access options. The first button is the publisher button. The second is the HINARI button. To get to full text, click on the HINARI button.
Look for the PDF option for the easiest saving and printing. The PDF looks like the paper version, has full-sized graphics, and page numbers. Other journals will look different, as they may be published by different companies or societies.
To get back to the results, close this journal window. Then click back on the browser.
Some articles will be available for free – see the Free in PMC note below the citation. This article is available for free from the journal, through HINARI, and for free in PubMed Central, the open access repository tied to PubMed. Click on any of these buttons to get to the full text.
Other articles may not be available through HINARI or for free. If you see NO buttons on an abstract, then it is not available.
If you see only a publisher button (NOT HINARI and NOT free full text), then you will likely be confronted with the option to buy the article, rather than the full text itself.
If you want to browse only those citations that you know are available via HINARI or for free, try the filters to the right of the results.
• The HINARI filter limits you to citations available in HINARI journals
• The Free full text filter limits you to citations available for free.
Browse both lists, as there may be overlap and unique citations between the lists.
This concludes the video on How to Search PubMed in HINARI. For more advanced searching techniques, see the video on Advanced PubMed Searching.