Thursday, July 30, 2020

Is the Journal Indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed?

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