The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center library's blog has a helpful
guide
to figuring out the status of journals within the National Center for
Biotechnology Information's confusing system of databases and the
interface to it (PubMed). Here are some key points:
- Ideally, a journal will be indexed in MEDLINE. According to the
MSK library, "[i]n order to be included in Medline, a journal has to
undergo a rather rigorous and selective review process." That's the
theory, anyway.
- "All journals that are included in their entirety in PubMed Central (PMC),
for example PLoS, are automatically indexed in PubMed (but not
necessarily in Medline, so visibility is OK but could be better)."
- A journal can deposit articles in PubMed Central (PMC), and the
article will be indexed in PubMed, but "[t]he journal is otherwise not
officially indexed in Medline nor PubMed. This implies the least
potential for visibility ... ."
To see whether a journal is indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed, one can search the National Library of Medicine's catalog of
Journals in NCBI Databases. For example, a search for the Pemanente Journal returned the reassuring information
In: MEDLINE: v16n1, Winter 2012-
PubMed: v9n1, Winter 2005-
PMC
