HOW TO SEARCH FOR MEDICAL JOURNAL ARTICLES ABOUT OCULAR MELANOMA

What is PubMed?

"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 39 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."

FOR JOURNAL ARTICLES ON UVEAL MELANOMA IN PUBMED:

For your convenience, the following link has been specifically created to find up-to-date online medical journal articles, books, and documents in the PubMed database 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 (because "&sort=date" is also part of the pre-set parameters in the above link). 

FOR JOURNAL ARTICLES ON CONJUNCTIVAL MELANOMA IN PUBMED:

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For your convenience, the following link has been specifically created to find up-to-date online medical journal articles, books, and documents in the PubMed database 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 (because "&sort=date" is also part of the pre-set parameters in the above link).

In the past five years, there have been around 2,700 journal articles published relating to uveal melanoma and around 250 relating to conjunctival melanoma (with more than half of those available as "free full text" to read online right now at no cost). 

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:

• 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 very useful tips from EyeMelanoma.org:

• 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.)

Also, PubMed provides instructions on "Saving and Managing Searches," including how to create automatic e-mail alerts on topics you have selected.

Effective 7/1/25: An updated National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy enables the public to have immediate access to published research on any NIH-funded project — "funded by NIH in whole or in part." Previously, the NIH allowed journals to charge an access fee for up to one year on these articles. As a result, the full text of much more research will now show up on PubMed as "free" immediately! 

The brief summary — the abstract — found at the beginning of any article can be viewed for free in your PubMed search results at any time. However, unless the article was published in an open access journal or meets the above "NIH-funded requirements as of July 2025," 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. 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.

Additional scenarios:

• A subscription-based medical journal may have a policy that allows for free access on its website either 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, you can click directly on the publication's website link to check for free availability there even when free options are not noted. There can be times you are pleasantly surprised to find that the full document is actually available — because an article status had failed to be updated to "free" at some point or had not been correctly labeled initially in PubMed.

For the full text of articles that are cited on PubMed but are not free, publishers require either a journal subscription or an individual article fee to read beyond the abstract's brief summary. If needing to avoid those 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 a copy.

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