PubMed Database Info
PubMed is the freely accessible online database of biomedical journal citations and abstracts created by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed primarily includes MEDLINE citations, but also contains:
- In-process citations which provide a record for an article before it is indexed with MeSH and added to MEDLINE or converted to out-of-scope status.
- Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing (when supplied electronically by the publisher).
- Some OLDMEDLINE citations that have not yet been updated with current vocabulary and converted to MEDLINE status.
- Citations to articles that are out-of-scope (e.g., covering plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily general science and general chemistry journals, for which the life sciences articles are indexed with MeSH for MEDLINE.
- Some life science journals that submit full text to PubMedCentral® and may not yet have been recommended for inclusion in MEDLINE although they have undergone a review by NLM, and some physics journals that were part of a prototype PubMed in the early to mid-1990's.
- Citations to author manuscripts of articles published by NIH-funded researchers.
Users can create a free My NCBI (NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information) account, which allows users to customize their searching, save searching, select filtering options, and set up automatic searches that are sent by email.
