MEDLINE

MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution. Compiled by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), MEDLINE is freely available on the Internet and searchable via PubMed and NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information's Entrez system. MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) is a computerised biomedical bibliographic retrieval system. It was launched by the National Library of Medicine in 1964 and was the first large-scale, computer-based, retrospective search service available to the general public. Since 1879, the National Library of Medicine has published Index Medicus, a monthly guide to medical articles in thousands of journals. The huge volume of bibliographic citations was manually compiled. In 1957 the staff of the NLM started to plan the mechanization of the Index Medicus, prompted by a desire for a better way to manipulate all this information, not only for Index Medicus but also to produce subsidiary products. By 1960 a detailed specification was prepared, and by the spring of 1961, request for proposals were sent out to 72 companies to develop the system. As a result, a contract was awarded to the General Electric Company. A Minneapolis-Honeywell 800 computer, which was to run MEDLARS, was delivered to the NLM in March 1963, and Frank Bradway Rogers (Director of the NLM 1949 to 1963) said at the time, "..If all goes well, the January 1964 issue of Index Medicus will be ready to emerge from the system at the end of this year. It may be that this will mark the beginning of a new era in medical bibliography.