Setting the Record Straight on MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMCLauren Topper, PhDPubMed Central Journal Review Program CoordinatorU.S. National Library of Medicine

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December 20, 2018

Setting the Record Straight on MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC

Lauren Topper, PhD

PubMed Central Journal Review Program Coordinator U.S. National Library of Medicine

Other Contributors:

Jennifer Marill, MS

Chief, Technical Services Division U.S. National Library of Medicine

Christopher Kelly, MBA

Program Specialist, PubMed Central U.S. National Library of Medicine

Kathryn Funk, MLIS

Program Manager, PubMed Central U.S. National Library of Medicine

We read this article with interest. We are pleased to see more attention being given to the issues surrounding questionable publishing practices. However, the authors have inaccurately described how journals are selected for inclusion in PubMed Central (PMC) and incorrectly characterized certain journals as being indexed in PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the U.S.

National Institutes of Health.

PubMed is comprised of citations from journals selected for indexing in MEDLINE (NLM’s bibliographic database), citations from journals selected for archiving in PMC (NLM’s full-text database), and citations for individual articles that are deposited in PMC by funded authors, in compliance with the public access policies of the NIH or other collaborating funders (1,2). Articles deposited in support of public access policies ensure that funded, peer-reviewed research is both preserved and publicly accessible.

Predatory Publishing in Orthopaedic Research http://dx.doi.org/10.2106/JBJS.17.01569 1 of 3

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The most accurate way to determine a journal’s status in the NLM collection is by searching the NLM Catalog (3) or alternative catalog interface, LocatorPlus (4). Each journal record indicates whether it is currently indexed for MEDLINE, archived in PMC, or is referenced because an individual article has been included in PMC/PubMed in support of a public access policy.

At present, MEDLINE comprises 92% of the more than 28 million citations in PubMed. As Yan and colleagues note, journals that apply to be indexed in MEDLINE undergo a scientific and editorial

evaluation by NLM’s Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (5). Likewise, journals that apply to be archived in PMC undergo a rigorous evaluation process involving expert consultants. This evaluation process focuses on the scientific rigor of the articles as well as journal policies, language clarity, and other elements that contribute to the objectivity and credibility of the content (6).

NLM may also reevaluate journals that are in PubMed to verify that they continue to meet our standards;

journals that fail to do so are discontinued, though citations from the period that the journal was included remain discoverable in PubMed (7). NLM also expects publishers of MEDLINE and PMC journals to adhere to established scholarly publishing guidelines and best practices (8).

Again, we thank the authors for their work on this important topic and hope that our comments help to clarify how journals are included in NLM’s literature databases.

References

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1. National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. Funders and PMC. 2018 Sept 12.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/. Accessed 2018 Dec 7.

2. National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. How papers get into PMC. 2015 January 7.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/submission-methods/. Accessed 2018 Dec 7.

3. National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. NLM Catalog.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals. Accessed 2018 Dec 14.

4. U.S. National Library of Medicine. LocatorPlus. https://locatorplus.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First. Accessed 2018 Dec 14.

5. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC). 2018 July 23.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/lstrccommittee/lstrc.html. Accessed 2018 Dec 7.

6. National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. Journal Selection for PMC. 2018 June 19.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/pub/journalselect/. Accessed 2018 Dec 6.

7. National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. PMC policies. 2018 Sept 11.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/guidelines/#standards. Accessed 2017 Dec 7.

8. Marill, J. Journal Selection at the National Library of Medicine: a new process for challenging times. Technicalities. 2016; 36: 2-5.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/staffpubs/lo/TECH_V36_N4_JulAug16_Marill.pdf

Conflict of Interest:

The authors are employed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the producer of the MEDLINE database, PubMed, and PubMed Central. This work was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.