PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It contains over 26 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
PubMed Provides Free Access to:
- MEDLINE, NLM's database of citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences.
- Citations that provide a record for an article before it is indexed with MeSH and added to MEDLINE or converted to out-of-scope status.
- Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing.
- Citations to articles that are out-of-scope (e.g., covering plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily general science and general chemistry journals, for which the life sciences articles are indexed with MeSH for MEDLINE.
- Citations to some additional life science journals that submit full-text articles to PubMed Central and receive a qualitative review by NLM.
- Citations for the majority of books and book chapters available on the NCBI Bookshelf.
