MEDLINE Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary!
NLM Tech Bull. 2021 Sep-Oct;(442):e7.
October 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of MEDLINE! MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's (NLM's) premier bibliographic database that contains more than 28 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.
Much has changed since MEDLINE was created in 1971. Here are some notable milestones:
- 1960: Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) was introduced as a controlled vocabulary for indexing, cataloging, and searching biomedical information
- 1971: MEDLINE is launched
- 1997: PubMed is launched, allowing internet access to MEDLINE data
- 2002: NLM Medical Text Indexer (MTI) was introduced to help automate indexing for biomedical literature
- 2021: New MEDLINE website launches (see New MEDLINE Website and Policy Updates)
Let's take a look at MEDLINE by the numbers. In Fiscal Year 2021 (October 1, 2020 รข€“ September 30, 2021):
- 5,281 journal titles
- 1,291,807 citations indexed
- 28,480,393 total citations
- 2.58 billion PubMed searches
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From WHSLA Member, Barbara Rugerri, MLIS, AHIP at Carrol University:
I remember taking an advanced online search class for my masters in the mid-1990’s. It featured MEDLINE, and I honestly say I fell in love. Prior to that class, I had never considered a library career in health sciences. But I loved how the database worked and soon I sought out an internship at Waukesha Memorial Hospital.
Barb
I remember going down to Chicago to RUSH to take a 3-day Medline Searching class. This was before PubMed or Zoom, so we were searching that old style-MEDLARS with the command language. One of the attendees was a physician. She was Indian, and treated all of us in the class to a wonderful dinner at an Indian restaurant in Chicago. The kind that had an oven where they stuck the bread dough on the side of the oven, and when it was done baking, it would fall down -- ready to be scooped up by hungry guests. It was a memorable week!
ReplyDeleteMichele Matucheski, MLS, AHIP
Medical Librarian - Ascension Wisconsin