PubMed Tip of the Month: Clipboard (November 2015)

The Clipboard feature in PubMed allows you to temporarily store citations for review; items are deleted after 8 hours of inactivity. To place citations on the Clipboard, check the box to the left of an article title on the results page. Choose Clipboard from the Send to menu at the top of the page. Click Add to Clipboard. An icon will appear at the top of the page with a link showing the number of items on your Clipboard. I use this feature in a two-step review process. When I am satisfied that I have a good search, I do a first pass through the results, quickly scanning the title of each article and checking the box for any citation that may be relevant. I send these items to the Clipboard. Once I have completed the initial review, I go to the Clipboard, change the view from Summary to Abstract (menu at the top of the page) and read the abstract of each article to decide whether or not it is truly relevant.

-Laura Pavlech