What is PubMed® and How Does It Differ from PubMed Central®?
What is PubMed?
PubMed is a citation database developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine® (NLM). Through the MEDLINE® database, users may search millions of journal citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences.
MEDLINE is the NLM’s bibliographic database of citations and abstracts drawn from approximately 5400 biomedical journals published in the United States and worldwide. All citations in MEDLINE are assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) from NLM’s controlled vocabulary to assist users in their searches.
Although PubMed does not display the full-text of articles, links to full-text articles are provided via PubMed Central, publisher’s websites, and other related sources, further enhancing the discoverability of your article.
Publishers accepted for participation in PubMed electronically submit their citations to NCBI prior to or at the time of publication. If the publisher’s web site offers full-text access to its journals (such as IngentaConnect), PubMed provides links to that site. As part of our content processing, Publishing Technology is able to distribute your article to PubMed shortly after it appears online. There is a small charge for this service paid for by the Journal.
Click here to view frequently asked questions concerning PubMed.
What is PubMed Central?
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital archive of full-text scientific literature in biomedical and life sciences. With a mandate to collect and preserve biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to the NLM’s extensive print journal collection.
PMC is a repository for journal literature deposited by participating publishers, as well as for author manuscripts that have been submitted in compliance with the Public Access Policy mandated by NIH and similar policies of other research funding agencies.
PMC provides openly available peer-reviewed scientific research. PMC does not include any non peer-reviewed research articles.
While publishers hosted on IngentaConnect may participate in PMC, Ingentaconnect does not supply full-text content to this service. Authors are to request permission from the publisher of Tobacco Regulatory Science to post on PMC.
There are 4 methods to ensure that an applicable paper is submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy. The Tobacco Regulatory Science Group publisher of Tobacco Regulatory Science follows the procedure whereby, the author asks the publisher if they (the author) can deposit a specific final published article in PMC. Once the publisher provides approval, the author submits the paper for inclusion in PMC. However, there is a 12-month embargo for PubMed to NOT place online for free public access. After one year of publication date, the NIH funded manuscript can be released by the author to PMC to be viewed by anyone free of charge.
The author can also choose the journal’s fee-based Open Access option for publishing the article online immediately months in advance of publication date for a fee. Should this be the case, the copyright is returned to the author(s) by the publisher and the author(s) are allowed to use the manuscript as they author(s) see fit.
This modest fee allows the journal to recapture lost individual reprint fees due to placing the manuscript free of charge at PMC.
Click here to view frequently asked questions concerning PubMed Central.