What is in PubMed?

This video describes the contents of PubMed and how it gets there, including the selection processes for MEDLINE and PubMed Central journals. For more educational materials on PubMed, see PubMed Online Training at www.nlm.nih.gov/oet/ed/pubmed/
Spanish version - • Qué hay en PubMed
Transcript:
(music)
PubMed, from the National Library of Medicine, contains more than 30 million citations to articles in the biomedical literature, with new material added daily.
It also includes citations to a useful selection of online books and documents.
With a foundation in clinical medicine, PubMed includes citations to literature on a wide range of biomedical and health topics including: environmental health, social sciences, microbiology, genetics, and chemical and physical sciences.
The largest component of PubMed is MEDLINE®, our premier bibliographic database containing citations and author abstracts from more than 5,000 biomedical journals published around the world.
To determine whether to include a journal in MEDLINE, we first ensure that it meets the Collection Development Guidelines of the National Library of Medicine and our basic scope, content, and practice requirements.
Second, we review the journal for scientific quality.
As part of this process, a group of external advisors known as the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee considers
the journal and makes a recommendation.
The committee meets three times a year to evaluate journals that have applied to MEDLINE.
We evaluate journals for: scientific rigor;
editorial policies and processes;
enforcement of ethics policies;
production and administration; and impact.
PubMed also includes citations and abstracts from articles included in PubMed Central or PMC, a free online full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journals, also hosted by us at the National Library of Medicine.
To be included in PubMed Central or PMC, a journal must meet the Collection Development Guidelines of the NLM and our basic scope, content, and practice requirements.
Then, we review the journal for scientific quality. This includes a review by external consultants.
Finally, we check that the journal meets our technical requirements.
When research is funded by the National Institutes of Health or NIH, the results must be available to the public.
Therefore, individual articles reporting the results of NIH-funded research are included in PubMed Central.
PubMed Central also serves as a repository PubMed Central also serves as a repository for peer-reviewed manuscripts for articles that report on research funded by other public agencies and private research funders that share a similar mission to NIH. We call these “author manuscripts.”
We add records to PubMed for these articles in PubMed Central
that share research results with the public, even if the article is not published in a journal selected for MEDLINE or PubMed Central.
Through the NIH Preprint Pilot, we make NIH-funded preprints available via PubMed Central, and discoverable in PubMed.
A preprint is a complete and public draft of a scientific document that has not yet been peer-reviewed. Currently, there are about 20 thousand preprints in PMC.
PubMed also provides access to the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s online Bookshelf.
Bookshelf is comprised of more than twelve thousand: technical reports, systematic reviews, clinical guidelines, reference works, andother monographs and reviews.
Like with MEDLINE and PMC, publishers must apply to have their materials in Bookshelf, and the selection process involves screening, scientific, and technical reviews.
Most PubMed records represent one journal article… and are composed of fields that provide specific information about the article, including the: journal source information, title of the journal article, names of the authors and their affiliations, abstract published with the article, and Publication Type, or description of the type of article, like Review or Letter.
For articles not in English, the PubMed records include the language in which the article was published.
The PubMed record provides research funding information and associated study data when it is available.
We at the National Library of Medicine add Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH terms, to records from MEDLINE-selected journals.
MeSH terms provide quick access to the topics of the article.
Publishers supply most PubMed records electronically. We enhance them with MeSH and with links to related resources.
In addition to providing free access to PubMed via the Web, we provide access to PubMed data to researchers, commercial vendors, and to the public for repurpose and reuse.
PubMed makes finding biomedical journal information easy, from anywhere you can access the Internet.