Once you begin looking at items in the results list you’ll notice that the vast majority of item records include a lot of citation information (e.g., authors, journal name, abstract, reference list, etc.) as well as options for finding similar or related articles.

There are also several tools built into PubMed that can help you keep track of your searches and any results you find relevant or interesting. Some of these will require that you create a (free!) account.

Email, Save, and Send To

If you’d like to save or send any citations from a results list to yourself, you can do so in three ways.

First, you’ll need to mark the checkbox to the left (above the result number) of any result you want to save. Then click on the Email button at the top of the results list, just below the search box. This will pull up a brief form that you can fill out to receive the article citations via email.
Alternatively, you can click on the Save button to save the article citations in a (text) file.
And, finally, the Send to button lets you send the selected results to, among other places, various collections you can create within your account. Collections are essentially folders of different saved PubMed results that you can access anytime you log back in.

An example PubMed results list with the Save, Email, and Send to buttons at the top circled to indicate their location. You can use these tools to save and email articles to yourself.

Cite and Share

Below each results on a results page, you’ll see options for citing and sharing that item.

Cite provides you with a system-generated citation for the item in four different styles: AMA (the default), APA, MLA, and NLM. It’s important to note that these automatically-generated citations are not always entirely accurate, so definitely double-check them before you use them in an assignment.

A close snapshot of PubMed's Cite tool. You can use it have the system automatically generate a citation for an article in several different styles, including AMA and APA.

The Share tool lets you share the article on Facebook or Twitter. It also provides you with the permalink for the item. A permalink is a stable, shareable URL that should always take whoever has it back to the item’s record page within PubMed.