MEDLINE
| Producer | U.S. National Library of Medicine (United States) |
|---|---|
| History | 1879-present |
| Languages | 39 languages for current journals, 60 for older journals |
| Access | |
| Cost | Free |
| Coverage | |
| Disciplines | Medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care, biology, biochemistry, molecular evolution, biomedicine, history of medicine, health services research, AIDS, toxicology and environmental health, molecular biology, complementary medicine, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, bioengineering, health policy development, environmental science, marine biology, plant and animal science, biophysics |
| Record depth | NLM Medical subject headings, abstracts, indexing, |
| Format coverage | Mostly academic journals; a small number of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters; about 45% are for cited articles published in the U.S., about 91% are published in English |
| Temporal coverage | 1946-present |
| Number of records | Over 26 million |
| Update frequency | Daily from Tuesday to Saturday; 2,000-4,000 references per update |
| Links | |
MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution.
Compiled by the United States 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.
MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) is a computerised biomedical bibliographic retrieval system. It was launched by the National Library of Medicine in 1964 and was the first large scale, computer based, retrospective search service available to the general public.
Since 1879, the National Library of Medicine had published Index Medicus, a monthly guide to medical articles in thousands of journals. The huge volume of bibliographic citations were manually compiled. In 1957 the staff of the NLM started to plan the mechanization of the Index Medicus, prompted by a desire for a better way to manipulate all this information, not only for Index Medicus but also to produce subsidiary products. By 1960 a detailed specification was prepared and by the spring of 1961 a request for proposals was sent out to 72 companies to develop the system. As a result, a contract was awarded to the General Electric Company. The computer (a Minneapolis-Honeywell 800) which was to run MEDLARS was delivered to the NLM in March 1963, and Frank Bradway Rogers (Director of the NLM 1949 to 1963) said at the time "..If all goes well, the January 1964 issue of Index Medicus will be ready to emerge from the system at the end of this year. It may be that this will mark the beginning of a new era in medical bibliography."
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