PubMed

In order to understand what exactly PubMed is and contains, it is helpful to understand a couple of other resources that are also produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

Please see below for more details about PubMed, MEDLINE, and PMC; how they are related; and how they are different.  You can also check out this helpful page from the NLM that goes into more detail.

What is PubMed?

PubMed is a free, government website that allows users to search for biomedical and health related scholarly literature.

Anyone with an internet connection can search in PubMed.  In order to access full text of articles, you will need to work through the OSU Library subscriptions, or another library's access.

What does PubMed contain?

The majority of the records in PubMed come from the MEDLINE database.  For more information about MEDLINE, please see below.

In addition to MEDLINE records, PubMed also contains a pocket of content that is non-indexed, such as:

• In-process records - These are items that will eventually be indexed for MEDLINE, but there has not been enough time for them to go through the full indexing process.  PubMed will put up basic or "skeleton" records for these items until they can have the full indexing applied.
• Out-of-scope records - These are items that are published within a MEDLINE-indexed journal, but the article itself is considered outside of the scope to be added to MEDLINE.  For example, a general science journal may only have its health science articles indexed, but not those articles talking about non-health science topics like geology or physics.
• PMC records - These are items that appear in PMC (PubMed Central; see below for more information), but are not published in a MEDLINE-indexed journal.  PubMed will also put up a basic record for these items, but they will never be indexed for MEDLINE.

What is MEDLINE?

MEDLINE is the premier bibliographic database created and maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM).  It can be searched through a variety of different interfaces, such as PubMed, EBSCO, and Ovid.

What does MEDLINE contain?

MEDLINE currently contains more than 28 million citations to journal articles going back to 1966.  It indexes more than 5,000 journals in the life sciences, with a primary focus or concentration on biomedicine and the health sciences.

When articles are added to MEDLINE, they go through an extensive indexing process where the indexers describe the articles in a very standardized way.  One piece of this indexing process is having MeSH Terms (Medical Subject Headings) applied to describe the "about-ness" of the article.

Journals are selected to be indexed for MEDLINE based on recommendations from the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee from the NIH.

What is PubMed Center (PMC)?

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text repository of biomedical, health sciences, and life sciences scholarly journal literature.

What does PMC contain?

PMC contains more than 6 million full-text articles.  There are 3 main ways that articles can be added to PMC:

• Journal/Publisher Program Deposit: Some publishers or journals may have an agreement set up with PMC to deposit their articles.
• Author Manuscript Deposit: PMC accepts some author manuscripts in order to comply with funder requirements.
• Digitization Projects: PMC also works on other special projects, such as a Back Issue Digitization project and a project to add NIH-funded preprints

Of special note, PMC is the required location where NIH-funded research must be deposited in order to maintain compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.  To learn more about this policy, check out our guide below.