MEDLINE

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. 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 MEDLINE Application and Evaluation Process . 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. A growing number of MEDLINE citations in PubMed contain a link to the free full-text of the article archived in PubMed Central . Some MEDLINE citations also have publisher-provided links to the full-text of the article at the journal website; exact details depend on the publisher's access requirements. PubMed data, including MEDLINE, can be downloaded as described on the Download PubMed Data page.