What’s the difference between PubMed and MEDLINE?
Answer
PubMed, from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, is a freely available, searchable database made up of more than 38 million citations emphasizing the biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Some of the citations may link to full text in PubMed Central (the full text archive) and from publisher web sites.
MEDLINE, also from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, is a biomedical and life sciences journal citation/indexing database and is a subset of PubMed, meaning when you are searching PubMed, you are searching MEDLINE. (MEDLINE as a subscription, standalone database is also available through commercial vendors such as EBSCO [providing some full-text access to a limited number of journals]).
IMPORTANT INFORMATION for UCNJ Libraries patrons:
- When searching PubMed or the MEDLINE subset and retrieve citations with no full text, the full text of the articles may still be available in one or more of our databases. That’s because the UCNJ Libraries have full text access to thousands of journals through our health sciences/sciences databases. Find those databases here: https://libguides.ucc.edu/az.php?s=113044
- DON’T PAY FOR AN ARTICLE! Paying for an article is not a library recommendation! If the article you want is not available through the UCNJ Libraries, we offer a free service called interlibrary loan (ILL) where we reach out to other libraries to ask them to share a copy of the article. (Information about the ILL Service is found here: https://libguides.ucc.edu/LibraryHome/ILL )
Take note: Current federal policies and reductions in force (staffing levels) at the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine have impacted research and access to it.