With over 35 million records indexed in PubMed, finding exactly the information you need in an efficient way can often prove challenging for many searchers. To help with this, NLM recently added a new search capability to the PubMed search interface called “proximity searching”. In a nutshell, proximity searching is when a search interface allows the user to look for records containing two different search terms of interest, while specifying how far part these two terms can be from one another in the title and/or abstract of the citation record.

This relational specificity allows the searcher to conduct a broader search (with more search results returned) than they would if they were phrase searching. A proximity search would also return a narrower (smaller) set of results than if the two search terms were being picked up by the search engine having appeared anywhere in the text, regardless of the distance between each other.

This ability to increase the precision of search results is what makes proximity searching a useful capability to have in the PubMed search interface toolbox. For detailed instructions and screenshots illustrating how PubMed’s proximity searching works, be sure to check out the following links:

• PubMed Update: Proximity Search Now Available in PubMed. NLM Tech Bull. 2022 Nov-Dec;(449):e4.
• New Proximity Search Feature Available in PubMed. NCBI Insights (nih.gov). 2022 Nov 30.
• Proximity Searching Tutorial (NLM)
• PubMed User Guide – Proximity Searching

Questions?

Be sure to Ask Us or attend an upcoming MSK Library PubMed training session.