PubMedMEDLINE

PubMed MEDLINE is the component of the PubMed database that provides access to MEDLINE-indexed bibliographic records. It is maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The collection covers a broad range of biomedical and life science topics and includes entries from journals selected for MEDLINE indexing.

Records in PubMed MEDLINE include bibliographic data such as authors, titles, journal names, publication dates, and page numbers, along with abstracts where available. Each record is linked to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the controlled vocabulary used to index and search content. Although most citations are accompanied by abstracts, some older or more limited records may lack them. PubMed MEDLINE does not host the full text of articles, but provides links to full text on publisher sites or to free full text when available via PubMed Central or other sources.

Access to PubMed MEDLINE is free and widely used by clinicians, researchers, and librarians for literature searching, systematic reviews, and evidence-based practice. The search interface supports advanced queries, including field tags, Boolean operators, MeSH terms, and filters for date, language, publication type, and more. While PubMed MEDLINE focuses on indexed citations, PubMed as a whole also includes additional data sources such as non-MEDLINE records and full-text repositories, expanding the range of accessible biomedical literature.

Historically, MEDLINE originated as a separate bibliographic database in the NLM system and became integrated into PubMed, which now serves as the primary public-facing platform for accessing MEDLINE-indexed content along with related resources.