MEDLINE

MEDLINE or Medline is possibly the most comprehensive medical literature database in existence, produced by the United States National Library of Medicine. It is actually an automated version of three printed indexes: Index Medicus, Index to Dental Literature, and International Nursing Index. It collects bibliographic references to the articles published in some 5,500 medical journals since 1966 and currently has more than 30,000,000 citations, with a process underway for the gradual loading of citations prior to 1966, which includes articles from 1871.

Each MEDLINE record is the bibliographic reference of a scientific article published in a medical journal, with the basic bibliographic data of an article (Title, authors, journal name, year of publication) that allow the recovery of these references later in a library or through specific recovery software.

Access to the database is free from the Internet, through PubMed.

The database

The database contains more than 26 million records from 5,639 select journals (NLM Systems) covering the fields of biomedicine and health from 1950 to the present. Initially the database included articles from 1965, but this has been improved so that articles from 1950/51 can now be accessed.

New appointments are added from Tuesday to Saturday. For citations from the period 1995-2003: 48% correspond to articles published in the US, around 88% are in English, and approximately 76% have abstracts in English written by the authors of the articles. The most common topic in the database is Cancer, which represents 12% of records between 1950-2016, having risen from 6% in 1950 to 16% in 2016. .