PubScience: Evolution or Devolution

摘要

Medline, the venerable and well-indexed database of citations and abstracts for the health sciences literature, is free on the Web. Perhaps this sparked a trend. Produced by the U.S. federal government, MEDLINE had always been an inexpensive database on traditional online hosts, but the advent of the Web created opportunities for MEDLINE to become freely available on a variety of sites. Medical Web sites use MEDLINE as a draw and an easy way to add content. The National Library of Medicine itself offers free versions of MEDLINE, first via PubMed and then with Internet Grateful Med. Of the two, it is PubMed that has received the greatest attention. The name PubMed is becoming better known than MEDLINE.