PubMed Update: Journals Search Improvement

The PubMed journals translation table has been updated to include journal names without initial articles such as: the, le, la, a, an, etc. This means that such journal titles can now be searched with or without initial articles and they will map to the appropriate journal.

For example, the following searches map to the journal The New England Journal of Medicine in PubMed:

1. New England Journal of Medicine
2. New England Journal of Medicine [journal]
3. The New England Journal of Medicine
4. "The New England Journal of Medicine"
5. The New England Journal of Medicine [journal]
6. "The New England Journal of Medicine" [journal]
7. New Engl J Med
8. New Engl J Med [journal]
9. "New Engl J Med" [journal]

Untagged terms are searched using Automatic Term Mapping (ATM), which includes the journals translation table. Search terms tagged with the [Journal] search field tag limit your search to the journal field only. You can see how PubMed processed a search by viewing the "Search Details" on the Advanced Search page.

This update is intended to make journal searching in PubMed more flexible; searches for journal titles that do not include initial articles such as examples 1 and 2 are newly supported. There is no change to searches that include initial articles in journal titles such as examples 3-6, and no change to journal title abbreviation searches such as examples 7-9. When double quoting a journal title as in examples 4 and 6, it is still necessary to provide the exact journal title including the initial article.