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Confirming that a Journal is Indexed in Medline and/or PubMed

 Pubmed is an interface used to search Medline, as well as additional biomedical content. Ovid Medline is an interface for searching only Medline content. Pubmed is more user-friendly and allows you to search through more content than Ovid Medline. However, Ovid Medline allows you to perform a more focused search.


Confirming that a Journal is Indexed in Medline and/or PubMed

by Dina

With so many new journal titles appearing each year, it is becoming more and more difficult to determine the quality and legitimacy of new scholarly publications. One often overlooked search tool that is useful for confirming whether – and to what extent – a journal is being indexed in MEDLINE and PubMed or both is: Journals in NCBI Databases. (NCBI stands for the National Center for Biotechnology Information.)

This resource can be accessed under “More Resources” from the PubMed homepage and is essentially a search of the (National Library of Medicine or NLM) NLM’s catalog limited to the subset of journals that are referenced in NCBI database records.

There are essentially three statuses that a journal can have in PubMed:

  • Every article in the journal is indexed in the Medline database (ie. Index Medicus) and PubMed PubMed was created to be the free public search interface to the Medline database so all Medline records will appear in PubMed. Medline records are also leased by other commercial databases, for example EMBASEScopus, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Clinical Trials (CENTRAL), so being indexed in MEDLINE will give a journal article maximum visibility.
    Index medicus: v8n1, 2014-
    MEDLINE: v8n1, 2014-
    PubMed: v8n1, 2014-
    Currently indexed for MEDLINE.
  • Only select articles from the journal that have been deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) in order to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy will appear in PubMed. The journal is otherwise not officially indexed in Medline nor PubMed. This implies the least potential for visibility as an article published in this journal will have limited viewership (unless it is indexed by other prominent biomedical databases, for example EMBASE.)
    Not currently indexed for MEDLINE.
    Only citations for author manuscripts are included.

    PubMed: Selected citations only.
  • Every article published in the journal will be indexed in PubMed but not in Medline. In order to be included in Medline, a journal has to undergo a rather rigorous and selective review process. Once a journal is officially included in Index Medicus, the records will undergo extensive processing, having MeSH headings applied to them and other value-adding indexing. All journals that are included in their entirety in PubMed Central (PMC), for example PLoS, are automatically indexed in PubMed (but not necessarily in Medline, so visibility is OK but could be better).
    PubMed: v1, 2014-
    PMC
    Not currently indexed for MEDLINE.

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