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Health Sciences

A guide to tools and resources for students in the CWU Health Science degree and certificate programs

PubMed vs MEDLINE

MEDLINE is a subset of PubMed. When using the PubMed database, it is searching for citations on MEDLINE as well as journals and manuscripts deposited in PubMed Central, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Bookshelf. PubMed is more user-friendly than MEDLINE but not all items in PubMed have been assigned MeSH terms. Because of this, PubMed is a good place to start a general search but for a subject search, try MEDLINE for a more specific match.

For a more detailed explanation on how these databases differ, check out https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/difference.html

Tutorials and Helpful Guides to Using PubMed and MEDLINE

Other Core Health Science Databases