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Introduction to
MEDLINE: A Guide to Effective Searching by Brian S. Katcher

The most remarkable thing about MEDLINE—other than its size—is the amount of human energy that has gone into indexing its contents. MEDLINE is the collective product of a small army of indexers, who have, for more than 30 years, characterized the contents of more than 4,200 journals that publish information about the causes, prevention, and treatment of disease and injury. Each of the more than ten million journal articles, letters, and editorials that are catalogued in MEDLINE has been read by a skilled indexer, who has assigned to it roughly a dozen subject headings, drawn from a controlled vocabulary of more than 19,000 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). If you understand the elaborate indexing schemes that are embodied in MEDLINE, you can use this understanding to search it with a high degree of precision.

Size is also important. Because its coverage is so broad, MEDLINE can be thought of as the index to the world's medical literature, the on-line catalogue of biomedical journal articles. It is an essential tool for assessing the scientific basis for current knowledge about health. MEDLINE is produced by the National Library of Medicine and is the largest and best organized database of its kind. But MEDLINE searching can be daunting, producing results that are too comprehensive or too limited to be useful, hence this book.

MEDLINE is a bibliographic, not a full-text database; it contains citations to the medical literature, usually with abstracts. Its full application requires reading the literature itself—in a medical library, in on-line journals, or in a personal collection of journals.

The intent of this book is the promotion of better searches and, hence, better application of what is known. The story of MEDLINE's origins and evolution, which sets the stage for understanding how this powerful database works, is told in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 describes the key indexing elements that are used to characterize articles in MEDLINE. This chapter also begins to show how this indexing information can be used to find articles. Because Medical Subject Headings are so important to searching in MEDLINE, they are described in greater depth in Chapter 3. (Throughout the text, specific Medical Subject Headings are set in SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Since “MEDLINE” itself is a Medical Subject Heading, it is displayed this way as well.) Chapter 4 illustrates how the combination of Medical Subject Headings and Publication Types can be used to focus a search, and Chapter 5 contains some practical tips.

There is no single, perfect way to search in MEDLINE. This book is designed to help you search with an understanding of what is possible and not be disappointed.

This text can also be seen as a pdf file for actual pages from book (Requires free Adobe Acrobat Reader).

Copyright 1999, Brian Katcher