Journals and databases

Medline from Pubmed

About Medline / Pubmed

PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s.

MEDLINE® (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's® (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains over 16 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®).

The great majority of journals are selected for MEDLINE based on the recommendation of the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC), an NIH-chartered advisory committee of external experts analogous to the committees that review NIH grant applications. Some additional journals and newsletters are selected based on NLM-initiated reviews, e.g., history of medicine, health services research, AIDS, toxicology and environmental health, molecular biology, and complementary medicine, that are special priorities for NLM or other NIH components. These reviews generally also involve consultation with an array of NIH and outside experts or, in some cases, external organizations with which NLM has special collaborative arrangements.

Time coverage: generally 1950 to the present, with some older material.

Source: Currently, citations from approximately 5,000 worldwide journals in 37 languages; 60 languages for older journals. Citations for MEDLINE are created by the NLM, international partners, and collaborating organizations.

Updates: Since 2005, between 2,000-4,000 completed references are added each day Tuesday through Saturday; over 623,000 total added in 2006. Updates are suspended for several weeks during November and December as NLM makes the transition to a new year of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary used to index the articles.

Subject coverage: The subject scope of MEDLINE is biomedicine and health, broadly defined to encompass those areas of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering needed by health professionals and others engaged in basic research and clinical care, public health, health policy development, or related educational activities. MEDLINE also covers life sciences vital to biomedical practitioners, researchers, and educators, including aspects of biology, environmental science, marine biology, plant and animal science as well as biophysics and chemistry. Increased coverage of life sciences began in 2000.

The majority of the publications covered in MEDLINE are scholarly journals; a small number of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters considered useful to particular segments of NLM's broad user community are also included. For citations added during 2000-2005: about 47% are for cited articles published in the U.S., about 90% are published in English, and about 79% have English abstracts written by authors of the articles.

Availability: MEDLINE is the primary component of PubMed (http://pubmed.gov). Searching is free of charge and does not require registration. NHS Evidence uses Medline suplied by Pubmed (via an Application Programming Interface) in order to make healthcare database searching available to the non logged in user.