Skip to Main Content
The University of Arizona

weird one- Library Toolkit for Professional Support Staff: PubMed & PubMed Central

This guide will provide helpful tips and resources that may be relevant to the work of a variety of support professionals including: administrative assistants, administrative associates, program coordinators, and research assistants.

What's the difference between PubMed and PubMed Central?

PubMed is a biomedical literature database which contains the abstracts of publications in the database.

PubMed Central is a full text repository, which contains the full text of publications in the database.

Publications that are archived in PubMed Central may be found when searching PubMed. In PubMed, the abstract of the publication is available and searchable. The same publication in PubMed Central contains the full text article and the full text is searchable.

Below are two screenshots for the same publication: a publication record in PubMed (record contains the abstract) and PubMed Central (record contains the full text.)

PubMed Record

PubMed Central Record