Learn about clinical trials and research opportunities in Diagnosis/Treatment section
Learn about clinical trials and research opportunities in Diagnosis/Treatment section
"PubMed [developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine] is a free resource supporting the search and retrieval of biomedical and life sciences literature with the aim of improving health — both globally and personally. The PubMed database contains more than 36 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It does not include full text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website or PubMed Central."
You will find information below on:
• Getting Started in PubMed (with a Pre-set Link to the Search Tool)
• Performing a Different Search on PubMed
• Finding Free Articles in PubMed Search Results or Through Other Sources
• Accessing Help Options from PubMed
GETTING STARTED IN PUBMED (WITH A PRE-SET LINK TO THE SEARCH TOOL)
For Uveal Melanoma:
For your convenience, the link shown below has been specifically created to find up-to-date online medical journal articles, books, and documents on PubMed that contain any of these key words (from broad to specific terms) relating to uveal melanoma: "ocular melanoma" OR "intraocular melanoma" OR "uveal melanoma" OR "choroidal melanoma" OR "iris melanoma" OR "ciliary body melanoma." The search bar will display this wording, and the results will be provided with the most recently added article in PubMed's database showing first (so "&sort=date" is also part of the parameters for the above link).
For Conjunctival Melanoma:
For your convenience, the link shown below has been specifically created to find up-to-date online medical journal articles, books, and documents on PubMed for conjunctival melanoma: "conjunctival melanoma." The search bar will display this wording, and the results will be provided with the most recently added article in PubMed's database showing first (so "&sort=date" is also part of the parameters for the above link).
In the past five years, there have been around 2,500 journal articles published relating to uveal melanoma and around 250 relating to conjunctival melanoma (with more than half of those available right now to read online at no cost).
PERFORMING A DIFFERENT SEARCH ON PUBMED
The above links work especially well if you are interested in skimming all the latest titles of journal articles and their abstracts every couple of months for a broad awareness of the latest discussions and findings.
Otherwise, being much more specific will obviously make your search results much more manageable. For example, you may be interested in just looking up journal articles about a specific cancer drug or a specific medical procedure.
To perform a new search:
PubMed's User Guide explains search techniques in detail, but here are three basic tips:
• Use the word OR (in uppercase letters) to separate each term when instructing the search tool to retrieve results that contain any of the terms, thereby broadening your search results (for example — ocular melanoma OR uveal melanoma). This can be useful when the topic you are interested in can be referred to in different ways.
• Use the word AND (in uppercase letters) to separate each term when instructing the search tool to retrieve results that must contain all of the terms, thereby narrowing your search results (for example — eye AND brachytherapy). This can be useful for decreasing the number of irrelevant articles. In this example, it would eliminate articles that only discuss use of this therapy in other parts of the body.
• As you conduct searches in PubMed for journal articles on specific topics, experiment with the search tool's algorithm by using or not using quote marks around phrases or by reducing or expanding the number of words you use. Even pluralizing a word can change the number of articles that come up in the search results. (You will always find the total number of results displayed immediately above the first result's information.)
FINDING FREE ARTICLES IN PUBMED SEARCH RESULTS OR THROUGH OTHER SOURCES
The brief summary found at the beginning of each article — the abstract — can be viewed for free in your PubMed search results at any time. However, unless the article was published in an open access journal, a free version of the full text is usually not available when published. So how do you determine whether the full article is available at no cost?
In your initial PubMed search results:
Or to only have free articles displayed in your PubMed search results:
As mentioned earlier, the full-text of an article cited on PubMed that would have initially incurred a cost to read can sometimes become free to read at a later point in time. For example:
For the full text of articles that are cited on PubMed but are not free — this applies to around 50% of articles found in the search results above — publishers require either a journal subscription or an individual article fee to read beyond the abstract's brief summary. If needing to avoid article costs:
For full details on how to search for medical journal articles on PubMed, see "Help Options" below.
EyeMelanoma.org provides a selection of "Recent Medical Journal Articles" relating to ocular melanoma diagnosis and/or treatment with links to free copies.
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions and Instructions for Conducting Searches
Navigation on the right-hand column of guide includes:
"Search" — "Display, Sort, and Navigate" — "Cite, Save, and Share" — "Advanced Search"
"Quick Tours for Everyone" Video Series
2-minute interactive tutorials on topics such as how to find articles on PubMed and how to save keywords used in a search (and set up email alerts) by creating a free account
New information added to this webpage: August 23, 2021
Links to all external sites re-verified on this webpage: September 6, 2023
Feedback? Email: Erica@EyeMelanoma.org
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