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Nursing

A guide containing resources and tips for students studying nursing or other health-related fields. Access this guide directly by using this URL: http://bsu.libguides.com/nursing.

What are the differences between Medline, PubMed, and PubMed Central?

MEDLINE, PubMed, and PubMed Central are all operated by the National Library of Medicine. It can be confusing to keep these tools straight, but it's important that you know each tool's purpose and how to use them.

MEDLINE

MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's journal citation database, and it has been in operation since the 1960's.  MEDLINE indexes more than 5,000 scholarly journals. MEDLINE content is the only content indexed with the NLM's controlled vocabulary of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). For more information about MeSH, see below.

PubMed

PubMed is the National Library of Medicine's database of citations (not full text). PubMed includes citations from MEDLINE indexed journals; works deposited in PubMed Central; books from the bookshelf of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), and more. PubMed was launched in 1996.

PubMed Central

PubMed Central is the National Library of Medicine's full-text repository, which launched in 2000. It contains full-text articles from thousands of journals, and acts as an archive of articles that were funded by grants in accordance with the National Institute of Health's Public Access Policy. 

Some of the journals available in PubMed Central are also MEDLINE journals, but not all. MEDLINE journals undergo a more strict vetting process than journals accepted by PubMed Central. If a journal is already indexed by MEDLINE, it automatically qualifies to be indexed in PubMed Central, whereas a journal that is qualified to be indexed in PubMed Central is not automatically qualified to be indexed in MEDLINE.

Locating Citations and Articles

PubMed and PubMed Central are free interfaces provided by the National Library of Medicine that can be used to locate citations and full-text articles, respectively.

Additionally, Ball State University provides access to the MEDLINE with Full Text database, which allows retrieval of full-text articles published within journals indexed in MEDLINE.

Reference:

National Library of Medicine. MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC (PubMed Central): How are they different?

More Information

Subscription, Open-Access, and Public Access

Whether or not and why you can access the full-text of an article will depend on its copyright and/or licensing agreements. There are three main access options:

Subscription Access

Subscription access means that the article's copyright is held by the publisher, who holds the work behind a paywall. Ball State provides subscription access to a number of paid databases, which you can access at the A-Z  Databases page (note: this page also includes Open Access databases). You may come across articles that are behind a paywall and not available through any of the databases that Ball State subscribes to and it may offer access for a one-time fee. Please do not purchase one-time access to articles, contact a librarian and we can look into other access options, including Interlibrary Loan.

Open Access

Open Access refers to content that is intentionally published to be freely available to anyone regardless of institutional affiliation/subscription statuses.

Public Access

Public Access refers to publications that must be made publicly available as a condition of federal funding that was provided to sponsor the study.

For more information, check out the National Institute of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy Overview.

Why are there so many different MEDLINEs?

If you look at Ball State University Libraries' A-Z Databases page, you'll see entries for three deceptively similar databases: MEDLINE, MEDLINE with Full Text, and MEDLINEplus.

MEDLINE

MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's journal citation database, and it has been in operation since the 1960's.  MEDLINE indexes more than 5,000 scholarly journals. The link on the databases page takes you to PubMed, which is the NLM's interface for searching MEDLINE citations, not full-text articles (though some may have links to the full text). Be aware that PubMed is comprised of more than just MEDLINE citations, so if you need to limit to MEDLINE citations only, use the MEDLINE filter or use MeSH terms.

MEDLINE with Full Text

MEDLINE with Full Text is a subscription database on the EBSCOhost platform which provides full-text articles from journals indexed within MEDLINE. This platform has the MeSH controlled vocabulary thesaurus built in. EBSCOhost is also the platform of more than 100 other databases, which you can search simultaneously, or easily navigate between databases.

MEDLINEplus

MEDLINEplus is a free resource created by the National Library of Medicine intended to provide current and accurate health information in an easy-to-understand way. This resource is intended as a consumer-health resource, and not necessarily for professional or scholarly use. However, in addition to the easy-to-understand summaries, MEDLINEplus does link out to research article citations in PubMed for further reading.