Abstract
ObjectivePubMed’s provision of MEDLINE and other National Library of Medicine (NLM) resources has made it one of the most widely accessible biomedical resources globally. The growth of PubMed Central (PMC) and public access mandates have affected PubMed’s composition. The authors tested recent claims that content in PMC is of low quality and affects PubMed’s reliability, while exploring PubMed’s role in the current scholarly communications landscape.MethodsThe percentage of MEDLINE-indexed records was assessed in PubMed and various subsets of records from PMC. Data were retrieved via the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) interface, and follow-up interviews with a PMC external reviewer and staff at NLM were conducted.ResultsAlmost all PubMed content (91%) is indexed in MEDLINE; however, since the launch of PMC, the percentage of PubMed records indexed in MEDLINE has slowly decreased. This trend is the result of an increase in PMC content from journals that are not indexed in MEDLINE and not a result of author manuscripts submitted to PMC in compliance with public access policies. Author manuscripts in PMC continue to be published in MEDLINE-indexed journals at a high rate (85%). The interviewees clarified the difference between the sources, with MEDLINE serving as a highly selective index of journals in biomedical literature and PMC serving as an open archive of quality biomedical and life sciences literature and a repository of funded research.ConclusionThe differing scopes of PMC and MEDLINE will likely continue to affect their overlap; however, quality control exists in the maintenance and facilitation of both resources, and funding from major grantors is a major component of quality assurance in PMC.
Highlights
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) creates and maintains resources that are at the heart of library services relating to health information
We can see this in the past decade: 96% of PubMed consisted of MEDLINE records in 2008, whereas 91% of PubMed consisted of MEDLINE records in 2017
The cause of the overall composition shift was evident when we investigated the records that were added each year to determine the percentage that were indexed in MEDLINE, in process to be indexed in MEDLINE, and not indexed in MEDLINE
Summary
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) creates and maintains resources that are at the heart of library services relating to health information. PubMed delivers a publicly available search interface for MEDLINE as well as other NLM resources, making it the premier source for biomedical literature and one of the most widely accessible resources in the world. Researchers, faculty, and students have repeatedly reported PubMed and MEDLINE as one of the few sources they use to search literature [2,3,4,5]. As research, publishing, and access to scholarly resources have evolved over recent years, it is important to determine the role that PubMed and other NLM resources play in the dissemination of research and other scholarly output.
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