Index Medicus was begun by
John Shaw Billings, head of the
Library of the Surgeon General's Office,
United States Army. This library later evolved into the
United States National Library of Medicine (NLM). For such a major publication over many years the history naturally involved many changes as people died and sources of funding changed.
Years of paper publication Index Medicus publication began in 1879 and continued monthly through 1926, with a hiatus between 1899 and 1902. During this hiatus, a similar index, the
Bibliographia medica, was published in
French by the Institut de Bibliographie in
Paris. The first volume of Index Medicus appeared in January 1879 and was listed as compiled under the supervision of
John Shaw Billings and Robert Fletcher, while later volumes were listed as co-edited by Billings and Fletcher. Billings retired from the National Library of Medicine in 1895. For most of the period from 1876 to 1912 Robert Fletcher was the Editor or Co-editor of Index Medicus. In 1903
Fielding Garrison became Co-editor and continued as Editor or Co-editor until 1917.
Harold Jones was editor from 1936 to 1945;
Frank Rogers, from 1949 to 1963; Clifford Bachrach from 1969 to 1985;
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 abridged edition is a subset of the journals covered by
PubMed ("core clinical journals"). The last issue of
Index Medicus was published in December 2004 (Volume 45). The stated reason for discontinuing the printed publication was that online resources had supplanted it, most especially
PubMed, which continues to include the
Index as a subset of the journals it covers.
Evolution from Print to Digital In the 1960s, the NLM began
computerizing the indexing work by creating
MEDLARS, a
bibliographic database, which became
MEDLINE (MEDLARS online) in 1971 when the NLM offered MEDLARS searches "online" to other medical libraries, and remote computers able to log into the NLM MEDLARS system.
Index Medicus thus (after 1965) became the print presentation of the MEDLINE database's content, which users accessed usually by visiting a
library which subscribed to
Index Medicus (for example, a university scientist at the
university library). 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). As users gradually migrated from print to online use,
Index Medicus print subscriptions dwindled. During the 1990s, the dissemination of home internet connections, the launch of the
Web and
web browsers, and the launch of
PubMed greatly accelerated the shift of online access to MEDLINE from something one did at the library to something one did anywhere. This dissemination, along with the superior usability of
search compared with use of a print index in serving the user's purpose (which is to distill relevant subsets of information from a vast superset), caused the use of MEDLINE's print output,
Index Medicus, to drop precipitously. In 2004, print publication ceased. 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). Biomedical journals indexed in MEDLINE, as well as those listed in
Index Medicus, are almost always quality journals because the National Library of Medicine will not index
junk journals. (See the
External links, below, for links to pages on the National Library of Medicine website that contain a list of journals indexed in MEDLINE; journals listed in
Index Medicus; and a list of
Abridged Index Medicus journals (also known as "Core clinical" journals). == See also ==