From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia.
MEDLINE (Medline,
Medical Literature Analysis and
Retrieval System Online) is a
comprehensive literature
database of life sciences and
biomedical information. It covers
the fields of
medicine,
nursing,
dentistry,
veterinary medicine, and the
health care system. As perhaps a
side effect of covering these
fields, it also manages to cover
nearly all of biology and
biochemistry, even covering fields
with no direct medical connection,
such as
molecular evolution.
It is compiled by the
National Center for Biotechnology
Information (NCBI) of the U.S.
National Library of Medicine (NLM)
and freely available on the
Internet through PubMed,
searchable with the
Entrez engine.
The database
The database contains over 14
million records from more than
4,800 different publications
(mainly
medical journals) from the
1950s to today, and new
citations are added daily.
Newer citations include abstracts
of the article in question. It is
designed to have global coverage,
but most records are from
English-language sources or have
abstracts in English.
MEDLINE uses
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
for information retrieval. Engines
designed to search MEDLINE (such
as
Entrez) generally use a
mathematical scoring system to
tailor results as closely as
possible to the specific request
made.
Impact
MEDLINE functions as an
important resource for biomedical
researchers from all over the
world. Along with the
Cochrane Library, MEDLINE
facilitates
evidence-based medicine. Most
systematic review articles
published nowadays build on
extensive searches of MEDLINE to
identify articles that might be
useful in the review. Many
articles mention the terms that
have been used to search MEDLINE,
to make the search reproducible
for other scientists.
Additionally, MEDLINE
influences researchers in their
choice of journals in which to
publish. Few researchers today
would consider publishing in a
journal not indexed by MEDLINE
because then other researchers
would not find (and cite) their
work.
See also
