It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but locating that perfect illustration can often be a challenge. For help with this type of quest, the National Institutes of Health recently introduced Images, a new database for finding images within the biomedical literature. The Images database provides access to approximately 3 million figures, graphs, photographs and illustrations from PubMed Central’s full-text digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
The Images search page will appear familiar to PubMed searchers, and shares many features that are identical to the PubMed interface. Images can be searched by keyword, author, journal, and PubMed ID number (PMID), and the search results are provided in order of relevance. Useful options for searching within a narrower field (e.g., the figure caption), or by size (e.g., pixel height or width) are also available. Search results can be saved temporarily by using the Clipboard, or saved indefinitely to a personal My NCBI account.
Developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine, all content contained in the Images database is subject to the general copyright restrictions that apply to material available through the NCBI site. For more information, see the NCBI Copyright Notice, and PubMed Central Copyright Notice.
Images database search help is available online, or through HSLS by contacting the Falk Library Main Desk at 412-648-8866 or via Ask A Librarian.
In addition to the NIH Images database, consider searching the HSLS image and multimedia resources to access several other biomedical and history of medicine visual collections.
~ Rebecca Abromitis