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Medline is a comprehensive literature database of life sciences and biomedical information. It covers the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine and the health care system. As perhaps a side effect of covering these fields, it also manages to cover nearly all of biology, even covering fields with no obvious medical connection, such as molecular evolution.
It is compiled by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and freely available on the Internet through PubMed, searchable with the Entrez engine.
The database
The database contains over 14 million records from more than 7,300 different publications (mainly medical journals) from the 1950s to today, and new citations are added daily. Newer citations include abstracts of the article in question. It is designed to have global coverage, but most records are from English-language sources or have abstracts in English.
Medline uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) for information retrieval. Engines designed to search Medline (such as Entrez) generally use a mathematical scoring system to tailor results as closely as possible to the specific request made.
Impact Medline functions as an important resource for biomedical researchers from all over the world. Along with the Cochrane Library, Medline facilitates evidence-based medicine. Most systematic review articles published nowadays build on extensive searches of Medline to identify articles that might be useful in the review. Many articles mention the terms that have been used to search Medline, to made the search reproducible for other scientists.
Additionally, Medline influences researchers in their choice of journals in which to publish. Few researchers today would consider publishing in a journal not indexed by Medline because then other researchers would not find (and cite) their work.
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