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Clarivate Databases: Differences between WoS and MEDLINE

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Peter Mangiafico edited this page May 1, 2018 · 1 revision

What is the relationship between Clarivate's MEDLINE database, Pubmed Central and WoS Core Collection?

  1. MEDLINE is available on the Clarivate Web of Science Platform from 1950-Present with over 27 million publications spread across over 5,000 journals. For additional details, visit here: https://clarivate.libguides.com/webofscienceplatform/medline
  2. Pubmed Central is an independent free digital archive of biomedical/life sciences literature with more than 3 million articles. It serves as a repository for participating publishers and authors who are complying with the NIH Public Access Policy.
  3. Web of Science Core Collection is a Clarivate database which includes over 70 million publications from 1900-present, with access to over 20,000 journals. Additional details here: http://clarivate.libguides.com/woscc/basics

Specifically, is the MEDLINE database a subset of Pubmed Central? But with some details removed (e.g. author affiliations)?

There is an overlap of journal titles between PubMed Central and MEDLINE. For a list of current PubMed Central journal titles, visit here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/ MEDLINE is a citation database which includes citations from journals all over the world. On the other hand, PubMed Central is a free archive, a repository of journal literature. A unique offering of MEDLINE would be the Medical Subject Headings (MESH) to index citations.

Do the records in the MEDLINE database eventually get incorporated into the WoS Core Collection with the extra metadata? If so, on what timeframe?

MEDLINE and the Web of Science Core Collection have distinct journal selection guides which are utilized for deciding what will be included in each database. To review the MEDLINE Journal Selection guide, you can visit here: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/jsel.html while at the same time reviewing the Web of Science Core Collection Selection guide here: https://clarivate.com/essays/journal-selection-process/ Both of these databases reside on the Web of Science platform which is greatly beneficial to researchers who can access specialized indexing within each database in a single search, on a single platform. For additional details on searching multiple databases on the Web of Science platform, please visit here: http://clarivate.libguides.com/webofscienceplatform/alldb

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