Do you ever wonder what the difference is between PubMed and MEDLINE? We will try to break it down for you so that you have better understanding between the two.
So, what exactly is Medline? Medline is produced by the United States National Library of Medicine. It contains 29 million references from approximately 5,200 biomedical, biology and health journals dating back to 1946. Articles that are indexed within Medline are assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) based on their content. Scholarly journals make up much of the content found in Medline, however there are also newspapers, magazines and newsletters that have been indexed into the database as well. Medline can be searched through various platforms such as through OVID, ProQuest and EBSCOhost interfaces.
Okay so what does PubMed have then? PubMed is a free database maintained by the National Center of Biotechnology information at the National Library Medicine. PubMed contains over 34 million references that cover topics on medical, biomedical and life sciences. Although PubMed is a way of accessing the Medline database, it contains more content including books, in-process and ahead of print citations and citations to non-medical journals.
PubMed and Medline have very similar content. In fact, approximately 98% of PubMed’s content is from Medline. The biggest difference between the two is its availability as PubMed is accessible freely online without a subscription, while Medline is only available to institutions that subscribe to the database.
PubMed may be free, but it is always recommended that you should access it via the library website in order to have access to many free full text along with the ability to request an interlibrary loan of an article we may not have.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?otool=njshuwllib
“MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC (PubMed Central): How Are They Different?” FAQs, Help Files, Pocket Cards. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Accessed August 1, 2022. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/difference.html.pubmed/?otool=njshuwllib