1. Literature search

1.2 Source documents

a. Searching on Internet PubMed

Besides being free of charge, PubMed has several other advantages:

  • PubMed provides access to full-text articles in two ways:

The full-text article may be part of PubMed’s permanent records, and thus available at no cost

It may also have been put online by the journal, and in this case PubMed has a link to the journal and to the full-text article. In this case there are two possibilities:

  • The article is available online at no cost by the journal (which is the case for some major international journals, for articles published in the last 6 months, and for articles having major impact in a domain.
  • The article is available only through a paid subscription with the journal, or by pay-per-view access