Nursing & Health Resources - Kokomo & Logansport: National Library of Medicine

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world's largest medical library. The Library collects materials in all areas of biomedicine and health care, as well as works on biomedical aspects of technology, the humanities, and the physical, life, and social sciences. The collections stand at more than 9 million items--books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs, and images. Housed within the Library is one of the world's finest medical history collections of old and rare medical works. The Library's collection may be consulted in the reading room or requested on interlibrary loan. NLM is a national resource for all U.S. health science libraries through a National Network of Libraries of Medicine®.

Access available for professions on the NLM Web site: 

• MEDLINE / PubMed Biomedical journal literature
• ClinicalTrials.gov Information for patients about clinical research studies
  Also see: Clinical Alerts and Advisories
• NIH MedlinePlus Magazine
  A quarterly guide for patients and their families
• PubMed Central
  A digital archive of life sciences journal literature
• ToxTutor
  A self-paced tutorial covering key principles of toxicology and was adopted from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) chemical and toxicology databases.
• DailyMed
  High quality information about marketed drugs
• . . . and much more!

MEDLINE is the largest component of PubMed, the freely accessible online database of biomedical journal citations and abstracts created by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM®). Approximately 5,200 journals published in the United States and more than 80 other countries have been selected and are currently indexed for MEDLINE. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM's controlled vocabulary, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®).

In addition to MEDLINE citations, PubMed also contains:

• In-process citations which provide a record for an article before it is indexed with MeSH and added to MEDLINE or converted to out-of-scope status.
• Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing (when supplied electronically by the publisher).
• Some OLDMEDLINE citations that have not yet been updated with current vocabulary and converted to MEDLINE status.
• Citations to articles that are out-of-scope (e.g., covering plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily general science and general chemistry journals, for which the life sciences articles are indexed with MeSH for MEDLINE.
• Some life science journals that submit full text to PubMedCentral® and may not yet have been recommended for inclusion in MEDLINE although they have undergone a review by NLM, and some physics journals that were part of a prototype PubMed in the early to mid-1990s.
• Citations to author manuscripts of articles published by NIH-funded researchers.

One of the ways users can limit their retrieval to MEDLINE citations in PubMed is by selecting MEDLINE from the Subsets menu on the Limits screen.

Other PubMed services include:

• Links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources
• Clinical queries and Special queries search filters
• Links to other citations or information, such as those to related articles
• Single citation matcher
• The ability to store collections of citations, and save and automatically update searches
• A spell checker
• Filters to group search results