nterest in evidence-based medicine has intensified in the medical community. Some journals are now devoted to publishing analytical summaries of articles published elsewhere, especially to analyze the reports in terms of evidence-based medicine. Some MEDLINE journals that publish such analytical summaries include ACP Journal Club, Evidence-Based Mental Health, and Evidence-Based Nursing.

To facilitate users' access to these analytical summaries, NLM has begun to cite the summaries and to link them to the citations of the articles they analyze, effective with summaries published in 2002. These links will be established when an appropriate item appears in any journal included in MEDLINE. Typically the item must be an authored summary of substantive length that includes an evidence-based analysis of an article published elsewhere.

The citation for the analytical summary will not include Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, but will be assigned the Publication Type COMMENT, and 'Comment on/Comment in' links will be made between the citation for the analytical summary and the citation to the original article it analyzes. Subject access will occur via the original article, and the MeSH terms applied to it. The citations to the analytical summaries will not be retrieved with the MEDLINE subset (i.e., MEDLINE [sb]) of PubMed because they will not have MeSH terms.

For example, an article was published in a November 2001 issue of the American Journal of Gastroenterology about the superiority of lansoprazole compared to omeprazole in treating heartburn. An analytical summary of this article was published in the May/June 2002 issue of ACP Journal Club. Both items are now cited and linked as shown below.

 

 

Note that the MEDLINE citation for the original article in the American Journal of Gastroenterology includes a 'Comment in' link to the citation for the analytical summary in ACP Journal Club. The citation for the analytical summary in ACP Journal Club includes a link to the full text of the summary in the Web version of ACP Journal Club as well as a 'Comment on' link to the MEDLINE citation for the original article in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

In the example, the ACP Journal Club citation is designated [PubMed - as supplied by publisher], but this designation is only temporary. Programming work is still underway so that completed citations that have no MeSH terms applied to them will be designated [PubMed], instead of reverting to the designation [PubMed - as supplied by publisher].

Linking MEDLINE^® Citations to Evidence-Based Medicine Assessments and Summaries. NLM Tech Bull. 2002 May-Jun;(326):e2.