PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC) — What is the Difference?

Most of you know what PubMed is, but for anyone confused about it or just plain interested in the relationship between PubMed and the similarly named PubMed Central (PMC), the quick and dirty difference is summed up here:

PubMed is home to approximately 21 million citations and abstracts

PMC is home to approximately 2 million free full-text articles

For those of you seeking a fuller–but still brief–rundown of PubMed vs. PMC, here are a few more distinctions:

PubMed:

• Began in 1996, born out of MEDLINE
• Is a database comprising citations and abstracts from the MEDLINE biomedical literature, as well as from life sciences journals and online books
• Includes links to full-text articles at several thousand journal web sites as well as to most of the articles in PMC

PMC:

• Began in 2000, born out of a 1998 conversation between two distinguished scientists at a San Francisco bakery (more on that in a different post…)
• Is a free archive containing more than two million full-text biomedical and life sciences journal articles and serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection
• Includes links to corresponding citations in PubMed and contains certain types of literature such as book reviews, which are not included in PubMed

For a summary and description of the principles and other components of the PMC archive, check out the PMC Overview.

Photo Credits: PubMed Logo and PubMed Central Logo used with permission by the National Library of Medicine.

Guest Post by Marla Fogelman.

Marla Fogelman has been a member of the PubMed Central (PMC) production team at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) since 2001. Her posts cover PMC-related topics, factoids and developments.

October 6, 2011  Tags: guest posting, MEDLINE, NLM Databases, PMC, PubMed, PubMed Central  Posted in: Guest Contributors, NLM Databases, PubMed

2 Responses to “PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC) — What is the Difference?”

1. klortho says:

   October 6, 2011 at 7:20 pm

   Hi, great post! I really like these brief, informative overview-type posts. How about one on the difference between Medline and PubMed?
   • NLMReferenceBlog says:

     November 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm

     Dear Klortho:

     Thanks for the suggestion. We plan to write a post about this.

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