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PubMed: More Search Tips: Saving and exporting citations

Advanced search tips for the PubMed biomedical literature database.

New PubMed Guide: http://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/pubmed

This is a guide to legacy PubMed. On May 18, 2020, New PubMed replaced legacy PubMed.

For a guide to searching, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), exporting results to citation managers, and saving searches and creating alerts using MyNCBI, please click the link above to the New PubMed Guide.

Saving citations in PubMed

To save specific citations from PubMed, select the checkboxes next to the citations. Choose Collections under the Send to: drop-down menu and click Add to Collections:

You will be prompted to log in to My NCBI (or sign up for a new account) and create a new collection or add the citations to an existing collection.

For more information about saving results in PubMed, see PubMed Help: Saving and E-mailing Results and Searches.

Exporting citations to a reference manager in PubMed

Mendeley and RefWorks
Install the Save to ... bookmarklet on your bookmarks toolbar. From a PubMed results page, clicking on the bookmarklet will bring up a list of all the citations on the page. Select the plus sign (Mendeley) or check box (RefWorks) next to the citations of interest, or Save All (Mendeley) or Select All (RefWorks) to select the entire list. For RefWorks, click Save to RefWorks.

EndNote and RefWorks
To export citations from PubMed to EndNote or RefWorks, select the checkboxes next to the citations on the PubMed results page. Choose Citation Manager under the Send to: drop-down menu and click Create File:

Download the file to your computer and import it into EndNote or RefWorks (under Add a Reference > Import from a file > Select a file from your computer).

Zotero
To export citations from PubMed to the Zotero add-on in Firefox, look for the yellow folder icon in the address bar (you may need to select Zotero under the Tools menu). When the icon is clicked, a list of citations will appear.

Select the citations of interest and click OK.