Welcome to the Phrase Searching in PubMed tutorial.

Sometimes, you may want to search PubMed for a phrase, or a multi-word concept, like recreational drug use. Searching this phrase in PubMed without any punctuation or tags will return all results that contain:

• The exact phrase
• The individual terms
• Related terms added by PubMed’s Automatic Term Mapping (ATM)

However, there may be times when you want to use advanced phrase searching techniques, including when:

• You receive no results or irrelevant results for a phrase
• You want to search with spelling variations on terms within a phrase
• You want to search with other variations on a phrase, like the words in a different order or within a specific proximity of each other

Complete this tutorial sequentially for a comprehensive overview of phrase searching or jump to the section that you need. Each section includes examples of phrase searching and hands-on practice.