Health Resources: MEDLINE- Database

This guide covers basic health resources available through LSU Libraries.

Get to Know MEDLINE

"MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine® (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains more than 24 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine." Mostly journals, the database also contains some newspapers, magazines, and newsletters that are centered around health professionals.

MEDLINE includes literature published from 1809 to present and contains "citations from more than 5,600 worldwide journals in about 40 languages; about 60 languages for older journals."

The database covers "biomedicine and health, broadly defined to encompass those areas of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering needed by health professionals and others engaged in basic research and clinical care, public health, health policy development, or related educational activities. MEDLINE also covers life sciences vital to biomedical practitioners, researchers, and educators, including aspects of biology, environmental science, marine biology, plant and animal science as well as biophysics and chemistry. Increased coverage of life sciences began in 2000."

From: MEDLINE Fact Sheet

MEDLINE This link opens in a new window
Sponsored by the National Library of Medicine, Medline contains citations and abstracts to international biomedical literature from over 3700 journals on topics including research, clinical practice, administration, policy issues, and healthcare services. The database contains a broad range of medical topics relating to research, clinical practice, administration, policy issues, and health care services. OldMedline from the NLM Gateway includes the years 1958 - 1965. The ISI/Web of Knowledge Interface contains info from 1950 to the present.

NOTE: LSU does not have MEDLINE Ultimate but we do have MEDLINE. The search is extremely similar in both.

1. To browse a list of subject headings available in the database, click the MeSH button on the blue sub-toolbar. Users can search MeSH in MEDLINE three different ways:

Term Begins With - Enter a term in the Browse for field and choose Term Begins With. An alphabetical list is displayed.

Term Contains - Enter a term in the Browse for field and choose Term Contains. The term searched appears first, followed by terms that contain the term in alphabetical order.

Relevancy Ranked - Enter a term in the Browse for field and choose Relevancy Ranked. The exact match for the term appears first in the list, followed by the relevancy ranked list.

2. Mark the check box to the left of a term.

3. Click Search Database. Your search query finds articles with the term as a MeSH Heading.

From: EBSCO Help

Advanced Searching with MEDLINE Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
A walk through of more advance searching in Medline.