What does "indexed in Medline" mean?
Medline is a database produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It includes several thousand journals that meet criteria established by the NLM. Articles appearing in journals meeting these criteria are indexed by NLM staff with Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms. NLM does actively curate the Medline database, removing journals that no longer meet criteria and adding new journals.
Being able to meet and maintain the criteria established by NLM and become indexed in Medline is considered by some to be a marker of quality or status for individual articles appearing in the journal. Because of this, some promotions processes ask faculty to state whether their publications appear in journals indexed in Medline.
Indexed for Medline
PubMed is an online interface to a suite of databases, including Medline. PubMed results includes articles from thousands of additional journals that are not indexed in Medline. Searching PubMed does not answer the question, "Is this journal indexed in Medline?"
To determine Medline indexing status, there is one source. Search Journals Referenced in NLM Databases by journal title. Each journal record will indicate whether it is currently indexed for Medline or not (see screenshot below). If a journal does not appear in the search results at all, citations to this journal do not appear in any NLM-created databases; however, search using the full title, abbreviated title, and other identifiers like ISSN before concluding that it is not included. NLM does actively curate the Medline database, removing journals that no longer meet criteria and adding new journals. Always review the Journals database to find current Medline indexing status.
