MEDLINE is the journal citation database of the National Library of Medicine.  It contains biomedical and life sciences references dating back to 1946 garnered from about 5,600 scholarly journals.  MEDLINE is a subset of the PubMed database and a PubMed search can be limited to MEDLINE records using the Journal Categories filter.  Every record in the MEDLINE database has been indexed with the NLM controlled vocabulary, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Continue reading →

If you are completing a manuscript and are thinking about where to submit it for publication, you may find the tool, JANE: Journal/Author Name Estimator, to be very helpful.  JANE is a free website which can help identify journals for publication based on the subject about which you have written.  In addition, JANE can find relevant articles that you can cite in your paper.  If you enter the title and/or abstract in the search box, you have the option to click on “Find journals,” “Find authors,” or “Find articles.”  Your document will be compared to millions of articles in MEDLINE to extract the most relevant matching journals, authors or articles.

When searching for a multiple word concept in PubMed, you will often get significantly different numbers of results if you do not use quotation marks around the terms as compared to using quotation marks.  Here is an example:

lymph node dissection – 40,235

“lymph node dissection” – 10,124

When you search for a concept without quotation marks, you will retrieve records which contain synonyms for the terms you entered as well as vocabulary (MeSH) terms for the concept.  For lymph node dissection, records with the term lymph node excision will be returned, as well as those appended with the MeSH term, lymph node excision.

Fewer records will be retrieved with “lymph node dissection” since all results must contain this exact phrase.