BIO 1408: Plants and Human Affairs

MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains more than 31 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.

MEDLINE is a primary component of PubMed, a literature database developed and maintained by the NLM National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). MEDLINE is the online counterpart to the MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) that originated in 1964 (see MEDLINE history). A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).

• Selection process: The current procedure for adding new journals to MEDLINE is described on the page How to Include a Journal in MEDLINE.
• Time coverage: MEDLINE includes literature published from 1966 to present, and selected coverage of literature prior to that period. For details about pre-1966 citations see OLDMEDLINE Data.
• Source: Currently, citations from more than 5,200 worldwide journals in about 40 languages.
• Updates: Citations are added to PubMed 7 days a week.

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What is the difference between searching MEDLINE in PubMed, ProQuest, and/or EBSCO?

• PubMed is a great interface for carrying out a basic scoping search - or if you wish to identify a limited number of key references.
• MEDLINE through EBSCO has an easy-to-use interface that allows for a more comprehensive and systematic search and works easily with citation managers.
• MEDLINE through ProQuest has excellent functionality for comprehensive and systematic search but is not as citation manager friendly as EBSCO.

MEDLINE Overview from the National Library of Medicine

MEDLINE (EBSCO) Contains citations to over 27 million journal articles in over 5,000 biomedical journals. In 2,200 of these journals, the entire articles are available in the database.

• The search boxes have drop down menus with many options that allow you to limit all text, abstracts, authors, dates, MeSH terms, title, volume, and DOI.
• The MeSH terms can be found by selecting the MeSH 2024 option in the top menu bar - shown in the red circle.

If you scroll down below the search boxes when you open Medline in EBSCO, you will see additional options to limit a search:

• Type of study, type of subject, age groups studied, and more.
• To search within the full text articles and/or limit the search to full text articles only.
• Find related words to apply to equivalent subjects.
• Limit to human subjects or use a menu of possible animals to choose the study subjects.

MEDLINE (ProQuest) contains millions of citations, derived from thousands of biomedical and life science journals, and indexed with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) from the NLM controlled vocabulary. Extending back to 1946, annual input now exceeds 700,000 citations.

To utilize the filters fully, you will want the Advanced Search option.

• The search boxes have drop down menus to allow limits to certain fields, such as author, title, date, and MeSH terms.
• MeSH terms can be found by selecting the Thesaurus option in the menu bar above the search box - shown in the red circle.
• MeSH subjects can be found by using the MeSH subject search bar under the publication date drop down.

There are also drop down menus that can be used to add search filters to the right of the search bars.

*Tip: The Document title & abstract -TIAB option is very useful for building searches for systematic reviews.  It shows under *document title and abstract* in the drop down menu.