PsycINFO Expert Tip: What’s a PMID?

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

Have you ever looked at a record in PsycINFO and wondered: what’s a PMID?

A PMID on a PsycINFO record in APA PsycNET.

A PMID on a PsycINFO record in APA PsycNET.

PMIDs are PubMed Identifiers – these are the unique identifiers that PubMed, a biomedical database from the National Library of Medicine, assigns to each item it indexes.

The PubMed record for the same article.

The PubMed record for the same article.

We cover some of the same journals in PsycINFO, and in April of 2012 we began adding the PMID to those records. On PsycINFO, the PMID displays in the full record view, and is a searchable field.

Why do this? Researchers who search PsycINFO and PubMed can use the PMID from a PsycINFO record to quickly find and save the same item in PubMed. And of course, someone who wants to see if an item in PubMed is indexed in PsycINFO can do the same.

We recently made one small change to how the PMIDs are displayed in APA PsycNET: PMIDs are now linked directly to PubMed, which makes this process even easier!

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Patti Avellanet

3 comments

  1. Hello Allison K. Cody: YOUR POST ON “What’s a PMID?” IT HAS BEEN OF GREAT HELP. Could you help me please with a different matter? I bought a Kindle Edition for a book which does not show pages. It only shows percentages and positions, for example: 83% Position 3065 of 4680. The book is AUTONOMY AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING IN A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT by Miranda Hamilton.(2013). ISBN978-1-4411-8980-6 (epub) P53.855.H36 2013 418.0078-dc23 2013000815. For citation I need the page numbers but unfortunately these editions lack of them. How could I make the citation of for example: “Independence means to do for yourself, to not rely on others for personal nourishment and support”. which comes in the second paragraph of 4% Position 141 of 4680? Could it be: Allison K.Cody (2013: 4% 141/4680)? or what would be a citation that complies with the APA codes? THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP IN ADVANCE. AUGUSTO GUADARRAMA

    • Hi Augusto –

      This post on the APA Style blog discusses how to cite ebooks, both in your reference list and for the in-text citations:

      http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/06/how-do-you-cite-an-e-book.html

      Based on that post, it sounds like most Kindle ebooks do have page numbers included, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to enable that on your particular model. If the book does not, the post includes some suggestions as to how to create a precise citation using other methods.

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