Article Date
October 13, 2021
October 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of MEDLINE! MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's (NLM's) premier bibliographic database that contains more than 28 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.
Some of MEDLINE's notable milestones:
- 1960: Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) was introduced as a controlled vocabulary for indexing, cataloging, and searching biomedical information
- 1971: MEDLINE is launched
- 1997: PubMed is launched, allowing internet access to MEDLINE data
- 2002: NLM Medical Text Indexer (MTI) was introduced to help automate indexing for biomedical literature
- 2021: New MEDLINE website launches (see New MEDLINE Website and Policy Updates)
Let's take a look at MEDLINE by the numbers. In Fiscal Year 2021:
- 5,281 journal titles
- 1,291,807 citations indexed
- 28,480,393 total citations
- 3.3 billion PubMed searches
You can view Medline through our Ebsco interface or through our Ovid interface:
Source: MEDLINE Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary! NLM Tech Bull. 2021 Sep-Oct;(442):e7. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so21/so21_medline_anniversary.html