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About searching PubMed

PubMed is a free database for finding research in the medical and health sciences with some social care content. It is a large resource containing over 34 million abstracts (short research summaries) and some links to full text articles. It is provided by the National Library of Medicine in the United States.

The PubMed links on the ARIIA Knowledge and Implementation Hub (KIH) webpage are search strategies developed by a librarian. They support each of the aged care priority topics and the individual evidence themes within them.

Our aged care priority topic searches include three options:

  1.  All
    This search helps you find as much as possible on the topic in the database, provided the item is available in English. For some very large topics, we may have limited the search to items published in the last four years only.
  2. Strongest evidence
    This option retrieves only systematic reviews, randomised controlled trials and clinical practice guidelines. These types of research are considered to have the lowest risk of bias. They may be the best place to start your search for evidence.
  3. Free full text
    With this option you limit your search results to articles which are freely available for you to read or download in their entirety. You do not need a subscription or library membership to access this research.

Our evidence theme searches provide two options:

  1. All
    This search helps you find as much as possible on the topic in the database, provided the item is available in English.
  2. Free full text
    With this option you limit your search results to articles which are freely available for you to read or download in their entirety. You do not need a subscription or library membership to access this research. 

Narrowing the search further

Some of these topic searches are likely to retrieve many results for you to have to look through. You may prefer instead to focus the search further to get fewer results which are more on a specific area of interest to you. For example, instead of reading through all the results for a search on ‘dementia care,’ you might only want to see those relevant to ‘falls prevention’ for people with dementia within this set of results.

If you wish to try limiting the search to a specific subject area, please download the instructions below.