How To Use Index Medicus

Index Medicus is a bibliographic listing of references to articles from biomedical journals worldwide. The National Library of Medicine indexes literature that has been judged most useful to Index Medicus users by a group of distinguished physicians, medical editors, and medical librarians. Materials selected for inclusion are indexed by highly trained literature analysts. Monthly issues consist of two volumes: Part 1 Subject A-P and Part 2 Subject Q-Z, Authors, and Bibliography of Medical Reviews. The cumulated contents of the twelve monthly issues comprise the annual Cumulated Index Medicus.

You can search Index Medicus by subject or by author. To search by subject, look in the Permuted Medical Subject Headings to determine if you are using the appropriate term. For example, if you look up "cancer" in the Permuted Medical Subject Headings, you will be directed to the term "neoplasms". Once you have determined the appropriate term, look in the subject index to find articles on the topic. Citations for a given subject heading are grouped together in the following order:

1. general articles to which no subheading has been assigned
2. articles which are listed under the appropiate subheadings

Each citation includes the following elements in order:

1. original English title of article, or English translation of title in brackets
2. first author (if more than one) or sole author
3. journal title abbreviation (see the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus for full title)
4. date of issue
5. volume number
6. issue, part, or supplement
7. page number(s)
8. the notation "Eng. Abstr." for non-English articles which provide an English abstract
9. an abbreviation indicating language of the article if other than English

To search for an author, look in the appropriate author index. If the person you are looking for is one of the first ten authors of an article, his or her name will appear in the author index. The complete citation appears only under the first author's name. The second through tenth authors are cross-referenced to the first author. For example, when searching the 1997 Cumulated Index Medicus for an article by A.M. Paolo, you are directed to the first author, D. K. Ziegler.

Both Index Medicus and Cumulated Index Medicus include citations to medical reviews. These are currently defined as well-documented surveys of the biomedical literature. Articles considered to be reviews include academic, classical or exhaustive reviews; tutorial, didactic or subject reviews; multicase or epidemiologic reviews; consensus conferences; reviews of reported, known or published cases; and state-of-the-art reviews.

In Index Medicus, the medical reviews appear in Part 2. In the Cumulated Index Medicus, they are in volume one.

Index Medicus is located on Index Shelves 3-7.