Can you think of a time you were digging through articles, scouring “Results” sections for a piece of information? Maybe you wanted to see how other people had measured and reported a particular type of data, or maybe you wanted to know the range of values that have been reported for a type of experiment.
If this is your goal, you’re probably only interested in an article IF it’s using a particular method or reporting results from experiments similar to yours. Maybe you can even picture the type of figure or table where this information would appear.
Enter PubMed Central. PubMed Central is a full-text database of NIH-funded research articles and open access journal articles. You may have contributed several articles yourself! Now is your chance to reap the benefits of this full-text database!
Search Example
Let’s say you want to find RT-PCR data from studies of hyperoxia in mice.
- Go to PubMed Central and click on Advanced.
- Change the label “All Fields” to “Figure/Table Caption”.
- In the search box, type words you’d expect to find in the text accompanying a figure: hyperoxia AND RT-PCR AND mice
- As you type, PubMed Central will automatically format your search so that it’s restricted to the Figure/Table caption.
Articles in your search results will contain all three of your terms in the text accompanying its figures or tables – although not necessarily all in the same figure.
If you’re only interested in quantitative RT-PCR, you can search for that exact phrase in the Figure/Table caption field by using quotation marks: “quantitative RT-PCR”.
Please view this document for screen shots illustrating these steps in PubMed Central.