What is PubMed?
PubMed® is the National Library of Medicine’s® (NLM) free, searchable bibliographic database supporting scientific and medical research. It contains more than 37 million citations and abstracts of biomedical and life sciences literature.
It does not include full text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website or PubMed Central (PMC).
The citation information featured in PubMed is derived from three main sources:
1. MEDLINE
MEDLINE is the primary database of citations and abstracts that PubMed searches. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). We will revisit MEDLINE in future modules when discussing MeSH.
2. PubMed Central (PMC)
PMC is a full text archive that includes articles from journals reviewed and selected by NLM for archiving (current and historical), as well as individual articles collected to provide access to the results of publicly funded scientific research, according to NIH and other funder policies.
3. Bookshelf
Bookshelf is a full text archive of books, chapters, reports, databases, and other documents related to biomedical, health, and life sciences.
Additional Training
For more information about what makes up PubMed and how it is used, take the PubMed Quick Tour – What is in PubMed?.