United States National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health

FAQ: OLDMEDLINE Status Change

Question: Why am I retrieving MEDLINE (rather than OLDMEDLINE) citations with publication dates prior to 1966?

Answer:

MEDLINE has always included a small number of records citing articles published prior to 1966 (about 109,000).

As of late 2006, the set of records marked with a status of MEDLINE includes OLDMEDLINE records where all of the original subjects have been mapped to current MeSH vocabulary. These OLDMEDLINE records will be retrieved in PubMed when limiting to the MEDLINE® subset by searching medline [sb]. Records that have not yet been completely updated to current MeSH will carry the status tag [PubMed - OLDMEDLINE].

PubMed or Gateway searchers not interested in these older citations are advised to restrict their searches using the date range function within the Limits feature, or to set up a filter for publication date.

Searchers can isolate records that originated from the older print indices of the Cumulated Index Medicus (CIM) and the Current List of Medical Literature (CLML) by searching the value jsubsetom.

See also the Technical Bulletin article Changes to OLDMEDLINE Records - Status Tag Change (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so06/so06_oldmedline_status.html).

For more information on:

OLDMEDLINE data
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/databases_oldmedline.html

MEDLINE Fact Sheet
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html

Return to the list of FAQs
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/faq.html

Last reviewed: 10 July 2008
Last updated: 11 December 2006
First published: 30 October 2006
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