Outreach News

Subsets on PubMed

PubMed provides free access to the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) MEDLINE database and other databases from the National Center for Biotechnology Information. One of PubMed's strongest search features for MEDLINE is the ability to limit your strategy based on certain subsets of literature.

There are three main types of subsets within PubMed - Citation Status Subsets, Journal Subsets and Subject Subsets. Recently, you may have noticed different tags applied to the citations pulled from PubMed. These tags indicate where the Citation Status is in the indexing process or origin of the citation. See their definitions below.

• [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] - This tag means the citation in question was submitted from the publisher electronically, or is from a journal not indexed for MEDLINE, or is from a journal that was accepted for MEDLINE after the citation's publication date.
• [PubMed - in process] - The citation is in the review process. Its bibliographic information is being checked for accuracy and the article is being indexed. Citations with this tag were originally PreMEDLINE records.
• [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] - The citation is within the scope of MEDLINE and has been indexed with MeSH headings, publication types and registry numbers and has been reviewed for accuracy.
• [PubMed] - Citation is for an article in a journal from which NLM regularly indexes articles, but this article is on a topic considered outside the scope of MEDLINE. The data has been checked for accuracy. [Source: NLM Technical Bulletin. 2001 January-February; 318:6-8.]

NLM indexes over 4,300 journal titles for the MEDLINE database. The Journal Subsets allow users to limit their search to citations found in core clinical journals, dental journals or nursing journals. The use of Core Clinical Journals subset limits the retrieval to 120 journal titles which are consider core to clinical medicine. These journals, formerly known as the Abridged Index Medicus [AIM] set, are titles such as Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Neurology, JAMA, Lancet, Medical Clinics of North America etc., many of which are found in most medical libraries. A list of these titles is available at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/aim.html .

Finally there are Subject Subsets which allow users to focus their retrieval to specific topic areas. Currently there are three Subject Subsets, two of which were once individual databases created by the National Library of Medicine [NLM]. The AIDSLINE database provided access to clinical literature dealing with HIV and AIDS. Once this database was absorbed by PubMed, the AIDS subset was created so that users could still focus just on that primary area of interest. The Toxicology subset offers information originally found in the TOXLINE database covering toxicological, pharmacological, biochemical and physiological effects of drugs and other chemicals. The newest subject subset to be added is that of Complimentary Medicine. Covering complimentary and alternative medicine, [CAM] on PubMed was created as a joint project between NLM and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine [NCCAM].

If you have any questions regarding subsets or any other aspects of PubMed, please contact: Susan Steelman, MLIS - Coordinator of Outreach Services, UAMS Library, 501-686-6737 or email: SteelmanSusanC@uams.edu.