PubMed provides a number of methods for saving citations and searches. This page describes some of the ways PubMed citations can be collected and saved for future use. Either browse through the page or click on a link in the menu below to go to a specific section of the page:
Additional options for storing and managing citations and searches are discussed in the MyNCBI portion of this guide.
The PubMed Clipboard is a temporary storage space in PubMed where selected citations from one or more searches can deposited. The clipboard will hold up to 500 items, will not allow duplicate citations, and is cleared automatically after 8 hours of inactivity (if you need storage for your citations for an indefinite time, consider using the "Collections" feature in MyNCBI). The steps for adding items to the Clipboard follow.
1) In a search results page, place checkmarks in the boxes next to the citation(s) that you want to place in the clipboard.
2) Next, click on the "Send to" drop-down menu and select the clipboard button. After doing that, select which option you would like to save (All results on this page, All results, or Selection). Then click the "Send" button.
3) Underneath the search box, you will now see "Clipboard" along with the number of items in your clipboard in parentheses.
To view the items in the clipboard, click on the hyperlinked number (500) which indicates how many items the clipboard holds. You can at this point do more searching and add more items to your clipboard or, if you would like to take some other action with your clipboard items, such as email them, please see the boxes below for instructions.
The following steps show you how to email citations from PubMed:
1) Either in the clipboard view or on the search results page, mark the boxes next to the citations you want to email.
2) In the "Send to" drop-down menu, select the "E-mail" radio button, choose the desired format you want the citations in and the order you want them sorted by, enter your email address, add a new subject line and text if you would like, and then click the "E-mail" button. Note: sometimes emails from PubMed are interpreted by email software to be spam so if you don't see the email in your inbox, be sure to check your junk mail folder.
In PubMed it is possible to save citations to your computer or other storage device as a text file. This can either be done as a straight text file or in .csv format (which can be used with Excel). The steps for doing this are listed below.
1) Either in the clipboard view or on the search results page, mark the boxes next to the citations you want to save to a file on your computer.
2) In the "Send to" drop-menu, select the "File" radio button, choose a format, select how you want the citations sorted, and then click the "Create File" button.
3) In the following pop-up box, select the "Save file" radio button and then click the "Ok" button.
Exporting citations from PubMed into a file which can be uploaded into bibliographic management software (EndNote, RefWorks, etc.) is a simple process. To do so, follow the instructions below:
1) Either in the clipboard view or on the search results page mark the boxes next to the citations you want to export into bibliographic manager software.
2) In the "Send to" drop-down menu, select the "Citation manager" radio button and then click the "Create File" button.
3) In the following pop-up box, select the "Save file" radio button and then click the "Ok" button.
4) Follow the procedures in your bibliographic management software to import the file containing the PubMed citations.
It is possible to create a URL for a search in PubMed, which you can then bookmark and rerun anytime you would like to just by going to that URL in the future. The following are the steps for creating such a bookmark:
1) On the right side of a search results page, click the "See more" hyperlink located just below the "Search details" box.
2) Click the "URL" button (located below the "Query Translation" box); this will return you to the search results page.
3) You can now bookmark the search results page (or copy and save the URL from the address box) and use it to easily rerun the search in the future.
