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Medline/PubMed (1950-present)
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Contents: the major international biomedical database, produced
by the National Library of Medicine (USA).
- Subject: medicine and allied sciences or specialties.
- Volume: over 800,000 records per year.
Total 1950-present: over 20,000,000 references.
- Document types: Medline/PubMed contains exclusively journal articles;
books and reports are not included. The database is produced by scanning
approximately 5,000 biomedical journals.
From the quantitative point of view this is only a fraction of the total
number of biomedical journals, but the quality of this selection guarantees
that virtually all important publications of the world literature are
included (however, Medline/PubMed has a strong Anglosaxon bias).
A list of journals indexed is available at the computer stations.
- Language distribution: Medline/PubMed has a markedly Anglosaxon bias.
This not only implies that the bibliographic records included are predominantly
in English (> 80%); also remember that all titles and keywords are in
English only. Major other languages: Russian, German, Japanese, French
(ca. 10,000/year or < 3%), Spanish and Dutch (ca. 1,250/year or < 0.4%).
- Availability: evidently, the ITG library does not subscribe to all 4,000 journals
selected by Medline/PubMed. The items which are available in the library are
not recognized as such by the system
- Update frequency: weekly.