MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC (PubMed Central): How are they different? Click here to read the factsheet on the NLM website, written in 2002 and updated in 2017.
PubMed Central is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature comprising journals that deposit material in PMC on a routine basis and generally make all their published articles available here.
PubMed comprises more than 37 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is the largest component of PubMed and consists primarily of journal citations; articles indexed with MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and curated with funding, genetic, chemical and other metadata.
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
MEDLINE: (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's bibliographic database that contains references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. MEDLINE uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing with tree, tree hierarchy subheadings and explosion capabilities. See below for the various platforms:
Find more databases: Medicine