Answered By: Arwen Meador
Last Updated: Jan 29, 2025     Views: 21

PubMed is a database of more than 37 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It does not include full text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website (open access articles), PubMed Central, and your institution.

PubMed is comprised of 3 citation sources: 

  1. MEDLINE indexed journals 
  2. PubMed Central
  3. NCBI Bookshelf

Although it is a subset of PubMed, PubMed Central is its own database with its own platform.  It is a free archive for full-text biomedical and life sciences journal articles. It serves as a digital counterpart to the National Library of Medicine's extensive print journal collection; it is a repository for journal literature deposited by participating publishers, as well as for author manuscripts that have been submitted in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy and similar policies of other research funding agencies. PubMed Central does not include citations from MEDLINE or NCBI Bookshelf. 

More details about the differences are available here.

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