PubMed, which facilitates searching for bibliographic data on medical publications, is a freely available interface to the Medline database. This search engine is maintained by the National Library of Medicine in the USA at the following address: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/.

There are two ways to perform a search. First we will focus on the simpler way and also explain how to find full texts. The more complicated way to search will be addressed at the end of this tutorial.

As you can see the full text has really been displayed.

In this case you are redirected to the website of the relevant journal, directly to the full text of the web version of the article.

In the event that the full text is not accessible here, we recommend verifying with the Discovery service (http://discovery.muni.cz) in the list of journals whether the journal might be accessible in a different database. If not, you can try the following method.

If you are interested in a publication which lacks a link for a freely available text or to which your institution does not have a license, you may try your luck and search the website of the journal to see whether this particular article might be available for free there.

That this option is possible will be demonstrated using the example of article 37.

As you can see, in this case the publisher has made the full text available online for free.

If you cannot access the publication with any of the methods mentioned above, contact your library with a request for an interlibrary loan.

The final form of the query is now complete and by clicking on Search you can start the search. The next steps will be the same as was shown in the previous parts of this tutorial.

Although PubMed is only a search engine, it is a valuable source of information for medical community, especially because of the links to full texts next to the individual records.