Skip to Content
United States National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health

Fact Sheet
What's the Difference Between MEDLINE® and PubMed®?

MEDLINE is NLM's database of indexed journal citations and abstracts now covering nearly 4,500 journals published in the United States and more than 70 other countries. Available for online searching since 1971, MEDLINE includes references to articles indexed from 1966 to the present. New citations are added weekly. All citations in MEDLINE are assigned MeSH® Terms and Publication Types from NLM's controlled vocabulary. MEDLINE citations and abstracts are available as the primary component of NLM's PubMed database, which is searchable via the Internet.

In addition to providing access to MEDLINE, PubMed provides access to:

Users can limit their retrieval to MEDLINE citations by clicking on LIMITS on the PubMed Home Page and selecting MEDLINE from the Subsets pull-down menu. Citations prior to the mid-1960s are located in OLDMEDLINE.

Scope of MEDLINE

The subject scope of MEDLINE is biomedicine and health, broadly defined to encompass those areas of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering needed by health professionals and others engaged in basic research and clinical care, public health, health policy development, or related educational activities. The majority of the publications covered in MEDLINE are scholarly journals; a small number of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters considered useful to particular segments of NLM's broad user community are also included.

Journal Selection for MEDLINE

The great majority of journals are selected for MEDLINE based on advice received from the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC), an NIH-chartered advisory committee of external experts analogous to the committees that review grant applications. Citations from journals selected via this mechanism also appear in the printed Index Medicus®. Some additional journals and newsletters are selected based on NLM-initiated reviews in subject areas, e.g., history of medicine, health services research, AIDS, toxicology and environmental health, molecular biology, and alternative medicine, that are special priorities for NLM or other NIH components. These reviews generally also involve consultation with an array of NIH and outside experts or, in some cases, external organizations with which NLM has special collaborative arrangements.

Special Collaborative Agreements

Publications in some specialized subject areas are selected by outside organizations with which NLM has special collaborative arrangements. The subject areas and organizations may change over time. In the past, they have included the American Dental Association, the American Hospital Association, and the Population Information Program at Johns Hopkins University. At present they include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.

A complete list of NLM Fact Sheets is available at:
(alphabetical list) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/factsheets.html
(subject list): http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/factsubj.html

Or write to:

FACT SHEETS
Office of Communications and Public Liaison
National Library of Medicine
8600 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, Maryland 20894

Phone: (301) 496-6308
Fax: (301) 496-4450
email: publicinfo@nlm.nih.gov

Last updated: 10 July 2002
First published: 10 July 2002
Metadata| Permanence level: Permanent: Stable Content