United States National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health

MEDLINE®: Number of Citations to English Language Articles; Number of Citations Containing Abstracts1

Years of Publication Total # Records # English (%) # Non-English (%) # with Abstracts (%)
2005-2008* 2,386,429 2,184,747 (92%) 201,682 (8%) 1,965,124 (82%)
2000-2004 2,648,273 2,367,490 (89%) 280,783 (11%) 2,089,091 (79%)
1995-1999 2,174,050 1,907,324 (88%) 266,726 (12%) 1,637,715 (75%)
1990-1994 1,973,969 1,651,869 (84%) 322,100 (16%) 1,438,414 (73%)
1985-1989 1,743,643 1,349,685 (77%) 393,958 (23%) 1,066,216 (61%)
1980-1984 1,439,063 1,069,020 (74%) 370,043 (26%) 721,591 (50%)
1975-1979 1,289,201 894,596 (69%) 394,605 (31%) 531,116 (41%)
1970-1974 1,109,918 695,501 (63%) 414,417 (37%) 30,390 (<1%)
1965-1969 942,205 512,894 (54%) 429,311 (46%) 15,532 (<1%)
1960-1964** 569,611 274,632 (48%) 294,979 (52%) 4,319 (<1%)
1955-1959** 386,636 183,646 (47%) 202,990 (53%) 731 (<1%)
1950-1954** 395,005 182,089 (46%) 212,916 (54%) 523 (<1%)
pre-1950** 71,635 40,976 (57%) 30,659 (43%) 148 (<1%)
Totals*** 17,129,638 13,314,469 (78%) 3,815,169 (22%) 10,060,092 (59%)

1Includes author abstracts (in AB field) or abstracts written by someone other than the author (in OAB, other abstract field).

*Based on searches performed in PubMed® (limited to MEDLINE which consists of completed citations indexed with MeSH®) on January 09, 2009. Publication year 2008 is not yet complete.

**As of December 2006, OLDMEDLINE subset citations that have all of their original subject terms mapped to current MeSH are included in MEDLINE. There are more citations in PubMed with these older publication dates; some are OLDMEDLINE status, but some are PubMed status or "as supplied by publisher" status.

***PubMed includes both the print and electronic publication dates in a publication date search; therefore, citations may be counted under more than one year. The totals do not include these duplicates.

NLM began to include abstracts routinely in online citations in 1975. Abstracts in earlier years largely come from NLM's collaborating partners and some projects to load data from back issues (such as from PubMed Central and other sources). When adding missing citations (gaps) in the OLDMEDLINE range of years (pre-1966), abstracts, if present in the original article, are now included.

Last reviewed: 27 March 2009
Last updated: 27 March 2009
First published: 25 June 2003
Metadata| Permanence level: Permanence Not Guaranteed