MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains over 21 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Contains citations only. Part of PubMed.
Contains citations from over 5,600 worldwide journals in about 40 languages; about 60 languages for older journals. 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 84% have English abstracts written by authors of the articles.