Medline. PubMed. Two words used often without a person being sure if they are the same, if they are different and if yes, what is the difference. The other confusion being about getting a journal included for selection – again in PubMed / in Medline…
In February 2021, the National Library of Medicine created the Medline website – https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline/index.html – to make information about Medline and PubMed, easy to find. The home page tells us clearly that Medline is a premier bibliographic database of the NLM (National Library of Medicine) and Medline is the main part of PubMed – which is a (larger) literature database maintained by the NLM’s NCBI (National Centre for Biotechnology Information
In other words, PubMed includes journals indexed for Medline and still more journals that are not indexed for Medline. Most of the latter are included from PubMed Central (PMC for short) – which is an archive of journal articles.
This website tells us more about Medline – its history, statistics, recently accepted journals, and FAQs. There is a complete section on selection of journals for Medline, the process by which one applies for this, and about the committee that handles the job of selection (LSTRC). Finally there is a detailed policy about inclusion of journals and more
Overall a great learning and reference resource for every journal editorial board!
Those who have learnt more about Medline will know that every Medline journal ensures that every single article is “indexed” with MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) Terms. MeSH Terms are added by subject specialist indexers to let anyone who is searching, retrieve articles “about” the topic they are searching.
For example different articles, where various authors use terms like heart attack, heart arrest, cardiac arrest, and more synomyms, will ALL be indexed with the term – myocardial infarction – and one retrieves all such articles if one searches – myocardial infarction[mesh].
In PubMed – only the Medline journals have this indexing; the others do not get mesh terms.
To learn more about Mesh and searching with Mesh – we have learn-at-your-pace online courses at www.qmedcourses.in
