National Library of Medicine (NLM), USA provides a wide variety of resources related to the biomedical and health sciences, both past and present. The format of these resources varies: searchable databases & databanks, bibliographic citations, full text (when available), archival collections, and images. Prominent amongst the NLM systems is MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval Systems) over 40 databases, of which MEDLINE is the most popular and commonly searched.
MEDLINE is NLM's premier bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. MEDLINE® (Medical Literature, Analysis, and Retrieval System Online) with over 12 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. It can be searched via PubMed® or the NLM Gateway.
Time coverage: 1966 to the present.
Source: Citations from over 4,600 worldwide journals currently in 30 languages; 40 languages for older journals cited back to 1966. About 52% of current cited articles are published in the U.S.; for the time period 1997-2001, nearly 89% of cited articles are published in English and about 76% have English abstracts written by authors of the articles. Citations for MEDLINE are created by the NLM, international partners, and collaborating organizations.
Broad coverage: Basic biomedical research and the clinical sciences since 1966 including nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, pharmacy, allied health, and pre-clinical sciences. MEDLINE also covers life sciences that are vital to biomedical practitioners, researchers, and educators, including some 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. By the end of 2001, most citations previously included in separate NLM specialty databases had also been added to MEDLINE.
Availability:
MEDLINE, the primary subset of PubMed, is available on the Internet through
the NLM home page at http://www.nlm.nih.gov
and can be searched free of charge. No registration is required. MEDLINE
services are also provided by organizations that lease the database from
NLM. Access to various MEDLINE services is often available from medical
libraries, many public libraries, and commercial sources.
Searching NLM databases:
Entrez, a search & retrieval system that integrates information from databases at National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). These databases include nucleotide sequences, protein sequences, macromolecular structures, whole genomes, and MEDLINE, through PubMed.
PubMed
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi),
a service of the National Library of Medicine, provides access to over
12 million MEDLINE citations back to the mid-1960's & additional life
science journals. This includes links to many sites providing full text
articles & other related resources. It provides a searcher with:
