HOW TO SEARCH FOR MEDICAL JOURNAL ARTICLES ABOUT OCULAR MELANOMA

"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 35 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 2,000 journal articles published relating to uveal melanoma and around 200 relating to conjunctival melanoma (with about 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 the latest titles/abstracts every couple of months for a broad awareness of the latest discussions in review articles or findings in research articles.

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:

• You'll want to start completely over by clearing out the pre-set search terms on the results page — click on the "x" at right side of search box — and then typing in your own search term(s). 

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:

• You will need to look for the "free PMC article" or the "free article" notation. When applicable, either wording is displayed in red right below the article's authors listed in the results. ["Free PMC article" provides a full-text link to PubMed Central, a repository for free journal literature. (For details, see PMC FAQs.) And "free article" provides a full-text link to the publisher's website.]

Or to only have free articles displayed in your PubMed search results:

• You will need to select the "free full text" option (under the "text availability" filter in the left-hand column of the page). Of course, you would then miss out on seeing the titles/abstracts of all relevant articles in your 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: 

• The National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy requires that "all investigators funded by the NIH" make publicly available through PubMed Central a "[no-fee] electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscript no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. This policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH-funded research."

• A subscription-based medical journal may have a policy that allows for free access on its website immediately for certain types of articles or after a certain period of time (typically 6 or 12 months after publishing if it ever occurs). After pulling up an article citation on PubMed, it can be useful to click directly on the publication's website link to check for free availability there when other free options are not available. Sometimes a change in article status to "free" has not been updated in PubMed.

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:

• Contact your local public library to find out whether it already has any paid subscriptions to journals you are interested in. Similarly, school alumni programs may provide this access for free through their libraries.  

• Speak to your healthcare providers about whether they have access to a journal article that is of special interest to you.

• Look at ideas from the Patient Empowerment Network in "7 Ways To Access Medical Journal Articles For Free", which includes asking the author for it.

For full details on how to search for medical journal articles on PubMed, see "Help Options" below.