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Vinod
Scaria
VirtualMed,Calicut.
vinodscaria@yahoo.co.in
Medline
is perhaps the most popularly used database by Medical
professionals and students. Every Doctor or Medical student who
regularly uses the Internet would have certainly stumbled on any
of the MEDLINE utilities available on the Internet. A practicing
doctor would find MEDLINE unavoidable for his day-to-day
practice and a Medical Student would find the database immensely
useful in advancing knowledge.
WHAT
IS MEDLINE?
MEDLINE
[MEDlars onLINE] is a bibliographic database maintained by the
National library of Medicine [NLM] and covers the fields of
Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Veterinary Medicine and Health
research.
MEDLINE
Indexes over 3K biomedical journals and the database is updated
weekly and includes about 400,000 papers every month.
Over 85% of the journals are in English Language. Non
English Language papers are indexed with an abstract in English.
MEDLINE
indexes Journals from 1966 to current, and the enormous database
hosts about 9 Million records.
DIFFERENT
VERSIONS OF MEDLINE
Different
versions of the MEDLINE Database are available. They Include CD
ROM versions and
Internet versions. Apart from the NIH website PubMed, many other
online versions of MEDLINE are available in different flavours.
Medscape,
Healthgate, Community of Science, Kfinder, Infotrieve, WebSPIRS,
OVID, , Paperchase and BioMedNet are just some of them.
PUBMED
PubMed
is the NIH website that provides access to MEDLINE free of cost.
The
Pubmed Website is maintained by NCBI which also maintains other
databases related to Biotechnology and Genetics.
 ADDITIONAL
FEATURES IN PUBMED
Apart
from Indexing Journal abstracts, PubMed also provides a link to
the Full Text article if available Online. The Full Text version
may be free as in open access Journals or may be restricted to
subscribers. In addition, it also links to PubMedCentral, a free
online archive of full text Biomedical journals, and the
Bookshelf, another utility of NIH, which publishes entire books
online.
Every
indexed abstract is provided with a unique PubMed ID [PMID], an
eight digit code which enables one to link directly to an
abstract in PubMed.
SEARCHING PUBMED
Pubmed
allows complex searching incorporating AND OR and NOT strings.
Eg:
If you need to search for an article on tuberculosis and
Rifampicin, you could use the string tuberculosis AND rifampicin,
and if you need to see articles excluding meningitis, you could
modify it as tuberculosis AND rifampicin NOT meningitis.
Pubmed
insists that you always optimize your search queries using the
MeSH [Medical Subject Headings] A MeSH browser is also provided
in the PubMed website: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/meshbrowser.cgi
ADVANCED SEARCH
You
could also search specific areas in the Journal like authors,
abstract etc. The Preview/Index utility http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=Index&DB=PubMed
lets you easily configure your search.
 Your
search results page looks like this:
You
could now sort your queries based on Publication date, journal
name or Author’s name.
CUSTOMISING
SEARCH RESULTS
By
default, Pubmed displays only the first 20 abstracts pertaining
to your query with links to subsequent pages containing the
subsequent abstracts. You could significantly increase this to a
maximum of 500 abstracts per page by clicking on the tab
designated ‘show’ on the top and bottom banners.
SAVING SELECTED
ABSTRACTS
Each
displayed abstract is numbered and provided with a checking
field adjacent to it. You can check the needed abstracts and
save it to your hard disk or to the clipboard and then finally
to your hard disk when you have checked all the required
abstracts.
The
selected abstracts are saved in an fcgi file, which can be
opened using any browser or text formatting tools or directly
loaded into a database.
BROWSING PUBMED
You
could indeed browse through the Pubmed website. The Pubmed
website lets you browse through the database using utilities
like the Journal browser http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/jrbrowser.cgi
, the
MeSH
browser: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/meshbrowser.cgi
and the Citation Matchers: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static/citmatch.html
and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/getids.cgi
.
The
Clinical Queries utility http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static/clinical.html
is an extremely useful resource for practicing doctors.
LINKING
TO PUBMED ABSTRACTS
You can link
to a specific abstract indexed in Pubmed. Just Construct the URL
as follows:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/utils/elink.fcgi?dbFrom=database&db=database&from_uid=UIDs
Databases
include (e.g., db=pubmed, dbFrom=nucleotide, etc):
PubMed is the
default dbFrom, (e.g., dbFrom=pubmed) and all databases
is the default db (e.g., db=all).
Only one
dbFrom may be specified, however several db are possible.
Separate dbs with a comma, e.g.,
db=protein,nucleotide
db=all
UIDs include the PubMed identifier (PMID), the molecular biology database
identifier (GI), and the OMIM MIM numbers. Separate
multiple UIDs with a comma, e.g.,
from_uid=11801962,11801297,11801285
Results are
combined and ranked using the average score for individual
citation scores.
Include a
second from_uid parameter to retrieve the relevancy scores for
another set of UIDs, e.g.,
from_uid=11802254,11802251,11802243&from_uid=11063292,11757762
OTHER MEDLINE
PROVIDERS
Many
other websites provide MEDLINE on the Internet in their own
flavours.
Medscape,
Healthgate, Community of Science, Kfinder, Infotrieve, WebSPIRS,
OVID, Paperchase and BioMedNet are just some of them.
These
resources are also available through many other websites, which
utilize the databases of the licencees.
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