MEDLINE Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary!

October 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of MEDLINE! MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's (NLM's) premier bibliographic database that contains more than 28 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.

Much has changed since MEDLINE was created in 1971. Here are some notable milestones:

• 1960: Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) was introduced as a controlled vocabulary for indexing, cataloging, and searching biomedical information
• 1971: MEDLINE is launched
• 1997: PubMed is launched, allowing internet access to MEDLINE data
• 2002: NLM Medical Text Indexer (MTI) was introduced to help automate indexing for biomedical literature
• 2021: New MEDLINE website launches (see New MEDLINE Website and Policy Updates)

Let's take a look at MEDLINE by the numbers. In Fiscal Year 2021 (October 1, 2020 – September 30, 2021):

• 5,281 journal titles
• 1,291,807 citations indexed
• 28,480,393 total citations
• 2.58 billion PubMed searches