Medline and PubMed At-A-Glance
| Medline | PubMed | |
| Content: | All the citations that are in Medline are in PubMed. | PubMed includes the citations from Medline and some extras (very new articles, articles still in-process). |
| Full-text: | Includes some full-text articles. | Includes links to full-text articles if they are free. |
| Full-text not available?: | Use the "Gett It!" button to find out whether Musselman Library owns the journal electronically or in print. If we don't own it, use the link provided to submit a request to Interlibrary Loan. | Use the "Gett It!" button to find out whether Musselman Library owns the journal electronically or in print. If we don't own it, use the link provided to submit a request to Interlibrary Loan. |
| RefWorks: | Allows for direct export of citations to RefWorks. | Users need to save citations as a text file, and then import them into RefWorks. |
| Search Limits: | Include date of publication; type of article; language; subject subset; studies by age, species, and gender of subjects; clinical queries. | Include date of publication; type of article; language; subject subset; studies by age, species and gender of subjects. |
| Availability: | The EBSCOhost version of Medline is only available to institutions that subscribe to the database (like Gettysburg College). | PubMed is freely available to anyone-- it does not require a subscription, and you can use it even if you are not affiliated with Gettysburg College. |
About Medline and PubMed
Wondering why we have two databases that are so similar? Here's what's going on. Medline is a database that provides citations to approximately 5,500 health, biology, and biomedical journals. It is produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, and articles indexed in Medline are assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) based on content. The content of the Medline database is available through a few different subscription search interfaces-- the one you use at Gettysburg College is through EBSCOhost.
The Medline database is also a part of what is searched when you are searching in PubMed. PubMed also includes citations that are not in Medline, such as newly published or still in-process articles (that have not been assigned MeSH terms yet). PubMed is a free database maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, at the National Library of Medicine.
The content found in PubMed and Medline is very similar (but not identical!): Medline includes approximately 98% of the PubMed data. The major difference between PubMed and Medline is searching these databases.