Skip to Main Content

PubMed: Display Settings

Making Your Results Easier to View

Your display options are located just above your search results and allow you to adjust the way your search results are presented.

Screenshot pointing out display options button above search results

Format: The default view is Summary, but you can select the Abstract option to view not only abstracts but also any Levy Library full-text buttons as well as supplementary information such as Publication Types and MeSH headings. Select the PubMed format or the PMID format to view results as PubMed bibliographic entries or lists of PubMed IDs, respectively.

Sort by: The default sort order is Best Match, PubMed's relevancy algorithm designed to bring the most relevant results to the beginning of the search results list. Other sort orders are:

  • Most Recent to display search results by the date they were added to the database.
  • Publication Date to display search results by date of publication.
  • First Author to sort results alphabetically by author name.
  • Journal to sort results alphabetically by journal name.

Items per page: PubMed automatically displays your search results with 10 citations to a page. You can change that number to 20, 50, 100, or 200.

Show snippets: Allows you to toggle view first few sentences of a search result's abstract.