Highlights of the September - October 2002 issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin
MEDLINE/PubMed End-of-Year Activities
Once again end-of-year processing has begun. What does this mean? First, NLM will temporarily halt adding new, fully-indexed MEDLINE citations to PubMed. NLM indexing staff will continue to index citations but these records will be held and not added to PubMed until the normal update schedule resumes.
During this time you will see an increase articles labeled [PubMed - In Process]. These citations will not have MeSH terms, and the bibliographic citation data, e.g., pagination values, will not have been checked for accuracy. Once the end-of-year activities are complete (tentatively targeted for December 2002), these records will be updated, and PubMed will use 2003 vocabulary in the MeSH translation tables and MeSH Browser as well as in the citation data.
NLM Classification 2002 - Now Available
The National Library of Medicine has announced the 2002 edition of the National Library of Medicine Classification. Beginning with 2002, the NLM Classification (www.nlm.nih.gov/class) is being published annually in electronic form only. Publication of printed editions ceased with the 5th revised edition, 1999.
The new online environment offers many advantages over print, including hyperlinks between terms and the MeSH Browser and class numbers; however, the biggest improvement will be in NLM's ability to keep the Classification current with changes in MeSH.
Journal Database in PubMed Replaces Journal Browser
PubMed's Journal Browser has been replaced by the new Journals database. "Journals" works more like other Entrez databases and includes journals found in all Entrez databases. The record for a journal can be displayed in a fuller format with more journal information than previously available in the Journal Browser. Links to LOCATORplus are still available.
MEDLINE Record Links to Genes and Proteins
For over a year, NLM indexers have been providing links between MEDLINE records and records for genes or proteins in LocusLink, the NCBI database that provides information about genetic loci, including information on official nomenclature, aliases, sequence accessions, phenotypes, EC numbers, MIM numbers, UniGene clusters, homology, map locations and related web sites. At the present time, there are six organisms in LocusLink - human, mouse, rat, fruitfly, zebrafish and HIV-1.
Journal articles that focus on the basic biology of a gene or protein from one of the six organisms are candidates for gene indexing. "Basic biology" includes areas such as function, structure and genetics. When creating the link, the indexer also provides a concise statement in the LocusLink record summarizing the new information about the gene or protein that is reported in the article. LocusLink is available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/LocusLink/.
NLM Completes the Reorganization of its Bibliographic Databases
NLM's project to reorganize its databases is now complete. All citations from AIDSLINE, BIOETHICSLINE, HISTLINE, HSTAR, POPLINE, and SPACELINE have been migrated to MEDLINE/PubMed, LOCATORplus, or the NLM Gateway.
MEDLINE Continues to GROW!! More than half a million articles added during 2002
NLM indexers have reached a new milestone as 502,056 articles were indexed for MEDLINE during 2002. NLM's new processing procedures are crucial to this workload increase. For example, in 2002 publishers submitted 292,000 (56%) of the articles electronically compared to 114,000 (22%) in 2001. Even more are expected for 2003 when over 600,000 articles are anticipated.