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PubMed: http://www.pubmed.org

Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh EH4 2XU, UK; malcolm@apoptosis.freeserve.co.uk

Keywords: information; internet; literature search; tool

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

First, library shelves groaned under the weight of volume after volume of Index Medicus. Then came Medline, a journal abstracting and search service initially available on CD (at a price) and, for the UK higher education community, by telnet and then on the web . . . and then there was PubMed.

It is a mark of its success that it already seems to have been with us forever . . . but it is only 5 years since former American Vice President Al Gore, in a breathtaking act of generosity, announced free internet access to PubMed. In a world where knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity (viz the human genome project), PubMed demonstrates the global power of the internet to transform access to information.

So what can it do? PubMed now contains more than 12 million citations (about a million more than Medline), and search fields include Medical . . . [Full text of this article]