PubMed alternative
The honest answer: you probably want PubMed plus, not instead.
PubMed indexes MEDLINE — about 30 million records, US-centric, English-first. It's authoritative but partial. A dengue, Chagas, schistosomiasis, or Japanese encephalitis search that stops at PubMed misses most of the relevant clinical literature, much of which is published in Portuguese on LILACS, in Japanese on J-STAGE, or in French on HAL.
Symmathy queries PubMed and nine more biomedical databases in parallel: Europe PMC, Cochrane CENTRAL, ClinicalTrials.gov, J-STAGE, LILACS, HAL, DOAJ, OpenAlex, and CrossRef. Non-English titles and abstracts are translated inline. Every record links back to its original source on its original database.
When is a PubMed-only search not enough?
- • Tropical and regionally-clustered diseases (dengue, Chagas, leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis).
- • Cochrane-style systematic reviews — the handbook explicitly recommends searching beyond MEDLINE.
- • Global health, public health, and health policy reviews with non-US case literature.
- • Trials and preprints not yet indexed in MEDLINE (covered by ClinicalTrials.gov and Europe PMC).
Is PubMed still in the loop?
Yes. PubMed is one of Symmathy's primary sources and almost always the largest portion of results. Symmathy adds breadth and translation — it doesn't try to replace MEDLINE.