MEDLINE

Related Topics:
Medline

MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is an international literature database of life sciences and biomedical information. It covers the fields of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, and fields with no direct medical connection, such as molecular evolution. Listing of an article in MEDLINE does not mean endorsement of that article.

Compiled by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), MEDLINE is freely available on the Internet and searchable via PubMed and NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information's Entrez system.

The database

The database contains more than 13 million records from approximately 4,800 selected publications covering biomedicine and health from 1966 to the present. The database is freely accessible via the PubMed interface, and new citations are added Tuesday through Saturday. For citations added during 1995-2003: about 48% are for cited articles published in the U.S., about 88% are published in English, and about 76% have English abstracts written by authors of the articles.

Indexing

MEDLINE uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) for information retrieval. Engines designed to search MEDLINE (such as Entrez) generally use a Boolean expression combining MeSH terms, words in abstract and title of the article, author names, date of publication, etc. Entrez allows also to find articles similar to a given one based on a mathematical scoring system that takes into account the similarity of word content of the abstracts and titles of two articles.

Impact

MEDLINE functions as an important resource for biomedical researchers and journal clubs from all over the world. Along with the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE facilitates evidence-based medicine. Most systematic review articles published nowadays build on extensive searches of MEDLINE to identify articles that might be useful in the review. Many articles mention the terms that have been used to search MEDLINE, to make the search reproducible for other scientists.

Additionally, MEDLINE influences researchers in their choice of journals in which to publish. Few researchers today would consider publishing in a journal not indexed by MEDLINE because then other researchers would not find (and cite) their work.

Inclusion of journals

Approximately 5,000 of the world's leading biomedical journals are indexed in MEDLINE. Selection is based on the recommendations of a panel, the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC), based on scientific policy and scientific quality. New journals are not included immediately.

PubMed's Journals Database ^* contains information about each included journal, such as official name abbreviation and URL.

Usage

Although it seems simple, searching MEDLINE effectively is a learned skill. Without some training it is easy to become frustrated by the amount of articles a simple search turns up. Contrarily, it is difficult to be sure that the search is comprehensive, even if it has collected thousands of articles.

There are tutorials for instruction on the PubMed interface to MEDLINE. Unlike Google searching of the Web, PubMed searching of MEDLINE requires a little investment of time. These tutorials are well worth the time they take. The Indexers classify all articles according to subject matter using a standardized vocabulary to describe the subjects - Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Using the MeSH database to define the subject of interest is one of the most useful ways to improve the quality of a search. Using MeSH terms in conjunction with Limits (such as publication date or publication type), Qualifiers (such as adverse effects or prevention and control), and text-word searching is another. Finding one article on the subject and clicking on the "Related Articles" link to get a collection of similarly classified articles is a good way to expand a search that yields few results. In addition to the National Library of Medicine's excellent tutorials, pages from a book on MEDLINE usage can be browsed at Google Book Search.

References

Journals Database, MEDLINE.

External links

JournalReview.org - 'An unbiased forum for review of the medical literature', An On-Line journal club
Entrez/PubMed (also available through the shorter link http://pubmed.gov)
Cross-database search with Entrez
All the databases searcheable with Entrez
PubMed Tutorials
MeSH database
Medline page - MEDLINE Journal Selection

Gourt Home::Gourt :: MEDLINE