MEDLINE includes literature published from 1966 to present, and selected coverage of literature prior to that period. See OLDMEDLINE Data for coverage details about the pre-1966 citations that are not comprehensive for that time period. Source: Currently, citations from more than 5,200 worldwide journals in about 40 languages; about 60 languages for older journals.
Citations are added to PubMed 7 days a week. More than 904,636 citations were added to MEDLINE in 2018. Updates are suspended for two weeks during November as NLM makes the transition to a new year of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary used to index the articles.
The subject scope of MEDLINE is biomedicine and health, broadly defined to encompass those areas of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering needed by health professionals and others engaged in basic research and clinical care, public health, health policy development, or related educational activities. MEDLINE also covers life sciences vital to biomedical practitioners, researchers, and educators, including aspects of biology, environmental science, marine biology, plant and animal science as well as biophysics and chemistry. Increased coverage of life sciences began in 2000. The majority of the publications covered in MEDLINE are scholarly journals; a small number of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters considered useful to particular segments of the NLM broad user community are also included. For citations published in 2010 or later, over 40% are for cited articles published in the U.S., about 93% are published in English, and about 85% have English abstracts written by authors of the articles.
MEDLINE is the primary component of PubMed (//pubmed.gov); a link to PubMed is found on the NLM homepage (//www.nlm.nih.gov). The result of a MEDLINE/PubMed search is a list of citations (including authors, title, source, and often an abstract) to journal articles and an indication of free electronic full-text availability. Searching is free of charge and does not require registration.
MEDLINE®
Medline comprises the primary content of PubMed®.
