Index Medicus

To this end, the publishers of Index Medicus must perform at least two vital activities: determine which literature is good (has quality) and provide access.

Early in the history of Index Medicus, quality was determined by manually sifting through publications and choosing what subjectively seemed good, but later the Editor of Index Medicus convened a committee of world experts to identify the world's best medical journals and then have citations for articles from those journals made accessible.

Index Medicus was begun by John Shaw Billings, head of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, United States Army.

[6][7] During this hiatus, a similar index, the Bibliographia medica, was published in French by the Institut de Bibliographie in Paris.

Debove, while Marcel Baudoin ruled as editor in chief and also as director of the Parish institute of bibliography.

[10] Harold Jones was editor from 1936 to 1945; Frank Rogers, from 1949 to 1963; Clifford Bachrach from 1969 to 1985; [11] Roy Rada from 1985 to 1988; and from 1988 until it ceased paper publication in 2004 it was produced by the NLM's Bibliographic Services Division.

The stated reason for discontinuing the printed publication was that online resources had supplanted it,[13] most especially PubMed, which continues to include the Index as a subset of the journals it covers.

It continued in this role through the 1980s and 1990s, while various electronic presentations of MEDLINE's content also evolved, first with proprietary online services (accessed mostly at libraries) and later with CD-ROMs, then with Entrez and PubMed (1996).

Today, Index Medicus and Abridged Index Medicus still exist conceptually as content curation services that curate MEDLINE content into search subsets or database views (in other words, subsets of MEDLINE records from some journals but not others).