Contact | |
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Research center | United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) |
Release date | January 1996 |
Access | |
Website | www |
PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.
From 1971 to 1997, MEDLINE online access to the MEDLARS Online computerized database primarily had been through institutional facilities, such as university libraries. PubMed, first released in January 1996, ushered in the era of private, free, home- and office-based MEDLINE searching. The PubMed system was offered free to the public in June 1997, when MEDLINE searches via the Web were demonstrated, in a ceremony, by Vice President Al Gore.
In addition to MEDLINE, PubMed provides access to:
Many PubMed records contain links to full text articles, some of which are freely available, often in PubMed Central and local mirrors such as UK PubMed Central.
Information about the journals indexed in MEDLINE, and available through PubMed, is found in the NLM Catalog.
As of 5 January 2017[update], PubMed has more than 26.8 million records going back to 1966, selectively to the year 1865, and very selectively to 1809; about 500,000 new records are added each year. As of the same date[update], 13.1 million of PubMed's records are listed with their abstracts, and 14.2 million articles have links to full-text (of which 3.8 million articles are available, full-text for free for any user).
In 2016, NLM changed the indexing system so that publishers will be able to directly correct typos and errors in PubMed indexed articles.
Simple searches on PubMed can be carried out by entering key aspects of a subject into PubMed's search window.