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PubMed - Searching Medical Literature: Clinical Queries

A guide to searching medical literature using PubMed, the MEDLINE search engine from the National Library of Medicine.

PubMed Clinical Queries

The PubMed Clinical Queries Page is designed to filter one search by three clinical research areas: Clinical Study Categories, Systematic Reviews, and Medical Genetics.  Click on the Clinical Queries link below PubMed Tools on the main search page.

The Clinical Queries Page has columns that let you preview the first five citations of the results for the three research areas. While previewing results, you may make alternate menu selections for the Clinical Study Categories and Medical Genetics to modify those results of your search. Citations display in Recently Added order and link to the Abstract format in PubMed. "See All" links to the complete results.    

Clinical Study Categories  
This column offers five categories to choose from:

  • Therapy: Retrieves clinical studies that discuss the treatment of disease. This is the search default.
  • Diagnosis: Retrieves clinical studies addressing disease diagnosis.
  • Etiology: Retrieves clinical studies addressing causation/harm in disease and diagnostics.
  • Prognosis: Retrieves clinical studies addressing disease prognosis.
  • Clinical Prediction Guides: Retrieves clinical studies which discuss methods for predicting the likelihood of disease presence or absence.

The scope can be defined as Broad (the default) or Narrow:

  • Broad: Includes relevant articles, but probably some that will be less relevant.
  • Narrow: Includes more precise articles, with fewer retrieved. 

Systematic Reviews
This feature is provided to help  locate systematic reviews and similar articles.  It combines your search term(s) with citations identified as systematic reviews, meta-analyses, reviews of clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, consensus development conferences, and guidelines. 

Medical Genetics
Filters citations to topics in medical genetics. You can choose from the following topics: Diagnosis, Differential Diagnosis, Clinical Description, Management, Genetic Counseling, Molecular Genetics, Genetic Testing, or All(of the listed topics).

Thanks to the University of South Dakota Libraries for the content on this Clinical Queries page.