The database Pubmed — which for many students and researchers is the first port of call when searching for literature on any medical or healthcare topic — has changed its interface. At the moment, ‘legacy’ Pubmed, the version most people are familiar with, is still available. However, Pubmed has announced that the new interface will become the default in May. This is likely to be followed by the ‘legacy’ Pubmed being switched off entirely.

The Medical Library’s direct link to the Cambridge filtered version of Pubmed (which highlights full text articles available to University of Cambridge staff and students through University journal subscriptions) has already been switched over to the new interface, so any people who normally access Pubmed via links on the Medical Library website should have experience using this new version. We strongly recommend that anyone who relies on Pubmed for literature searching spend some time familiarising themselves with the new interface, so that they’re not surprised by, or struggling with, it when the old interface gets switched off.

The Medical Library has created a top tips guide to the new Pubmed interface. You can find this guide, along with top tips guides to many other databases and other software, on the Top Tips Guides and Videos section of the library website. There are also guides and an FAQs section on the new Pubmed homepage.

Please get in touch with the library training team if you have any questions about using the new Pubmed interface. The training email address is librarytraining@medschl.cam.ac.uk.