Wednesday, March 15, 2006

What's the difference between MEDLINE and PubMed?

Medline is a subset of about 5,000 biomedical journals indexed in PubMed. All the journals indexed in Medline were chosen for inclusion. Think of Medline as indexing "the cream of the crop" for medical journals.

PubMed is a much larger database that includes the MEDLINE subset, as well as indexing info from other "worlds" such as aerospace medicine, toxicology, some out-of-scope citations in astrophysics and plate tectonics.

You will find links for both Medline (Ovid) and PubMed on the Affinity Libraries website. If you use PubMed link on the Library Website, you'll get the added benefit of having our print and some online holdings incorprated into the search results.

For more information, see the following fact sheet from The National Library of Medicine :

NLM Fact Sheet : What's the Difference between Medline and PubMed?
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html

The Ebling Health Science Library at The University of Wisconsin Madison has a useful handout comparing both versions of Medline. MEDLINE : Ovid vs. PubMed.
(Please be aware that Ovid access info will differ through Affinity.)

What about MedlinePlus? MedlinePlus provides quality consumer health and patient education information.

Feel free to contact the Libraries if you have any questions on this.
MMC Library (Oshkosh) 3-0340
STE Library (Appleton) 8-2324