BIO 1408/NSC 1408: Plants and Human Affairs

MEDLINE

MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine® (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains more than 23 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 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®). MEDLINE is the online counterpart to MEDLARS® (MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) that originated in 1964.

MEDLINE is the primary component of PubMed®, part of the Entrez series of databases provided by the NLM National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Source: Currently, citations from more than  5,600  worldwide journals in about 40 languages; about 60 languages for older journals. Citations for MEDLINE are created by the NLM, international partners, and collaborating organizations.

HOW ARE MEDLINE, PubMed and PubMed Central different?

• MEDLINE^® is the National Library of Medicine^® (NLM^®) journal citation database. Started in the 1960s, it now provides more than 22 million references to biomedical and life sciences journal articles back to 1946.

• PubMed has been available since 1996. Its more than 25 million references include the MEDLINE database plus the following types of citations:

  • In-process citations, which provide records for articles before those records go through quality control and are indexed with MeSH or converted to out-of-scope status.
  • Citations to articles that are out-of-scope (e.g., covering plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily general science and general chemistry journals, for which only the life sciences articles are indexed with MeSH.
  • "Ahead of Print" citations that precede the article's final publication in a MEDLINE indexed journal.
  • Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing (when supplied electronically by the publisher).
  • Pre-1966 citations that have not yet been updated with current MeSH and converted to MEDLINE status.
  • Citations to some additional life sciences journals that submit full text to PMC^® (PubMed Central^®) and receive a qualitative review by NLM.
  • Citations to author manuscripts of articles published by NIH-funded researchers.
  • Citations for the majority of books available on the NCBI Bookshelf (a citation for the book and in some cases each chapter of the book)

• PMC (PubMed Central) launched in 2000 as a free archive for full-text biomedical and life sciences journal articles