ubMed Central (PMC) is the National Insititutes of Health's Web-based repository for peer-reviewed primary research reports in the life sciences. You can view the full text of articles on PMC at no charge, and beginning August 15, 2000 these articles are accessible from links on PubMed citations.

To see how links from PubMed to PMC work, type the number 10749918 into PubMed's query box and click "Go." This search (using a PubMed Unique Identifier) retrieves a single citation which is displayed in the Summary format (see Figure 1 below).

 

The words "Free in PMC" on a red background appear next to the Related Articles link. This indicates there is a link to the full text in PubMed Central from the fuller PubMed display formats, Abstract and Citation. Click on this icon to display the Abstract format, or change the Display format using the pull-down menu and the Display button. On these fuller reference display formats you see a "PubMed Central - FREE full text" icon (see Figure 2). Click on this icon to go to the full electronic article in PubMed Central, where the text can be viewed as HTML through a Web browser and downloaded in PDF format.

At this time, PubMed has links to articles from two journals represented in PubMed Central, Molecular Biology of the Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Links to articles from other participating PMC journals will be added in the near future. Also, in the coming months more publishers are expected to make their journals available on PMC.

A link to PubMed Central will eventually be added to PubMed's sidebar and the PubMed Help will be updated with this information.

By Annette M. Nahin
MEDLARS Management Section

Nahin AM. PubMed Central Links Added to PubMed. NLM Tech Bull. 2000 Sep-Oct;(316):e2.