Databases

Medline is the most important bibliographic database for health and medicine journals, having over 14 million citations to biomedical articles dating back to the 1950’s. Over 4,600 current biomedical journals are indexed.

A free search system for Medline has been provided by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) in a product called Entrez PubMed.

Note: A bibliographic database will provide a list of citations as a result of a search (ie author, article title, journal, year of publication and volume/issue/page details) but not the article itself.

In addition to citations, PubMed provides links (where they are available) to:

• summaries of the articles (called abstracts),
• the source of the article for online purchase
• the free full text of the article

Here is a search to try, that retrieves a manageable number of results and has examples of all the levels of information PubMed can supply. (Cut and paste or type the terms just as they appear here, in the search box at the top of the page)

                 NSAIDs "gastrointestinal toxicity" prevention

Looking through the results list, each entry has an icon on the left:

	No further information available
	Abstract freely available (and the abstract page may have a link to purchase the complete article)
	Free full text available
	Free full text available in PubMedCentral

PubMedCentral is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, numbering several hundred thousand items (most of these articles are also cited in PubMed). Some of the material available goes back to the year 1900.

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