The United States Government-funded National Library of Medicine has for years been a marvelous information resource for physicians and other healthcare professionals, and since the advent of the World Wide Web, for healthcare consumers as well.

Of particular interest to attorneys involved with medical issues is MEDLINE®, The National Library of Medicine's online database of citations to over fourteen million articles from approximately 4,800 biomedical journals published worldwide since the mid-1960's. Ten years ago, MEDLINE's availability was pretty much limited to medical libraries, which were billed for its use. But in 1997 with the launching of the PubMed search site, The National Library of Medicine gave to the world the gift of free MEDLINE. After several stages of improvements, PubMed now offers an easy-to-use search engine that not only produces good results for novice searchers, but at the same time, accommodates the advanced searching techniques of information professionals.

Searching MEDLINE at PubMed is great for locating authoritative medical literature to strengthen and substantiate the testimonies of your medical experts or for finding out what a particular expert has published. For best results, take the time and effort to carefully study PubMed's help pages.

Realize that PubMed does not necessarily produce your entire journal article, but gives you only the citation to that article. The majority of MEDLINE cites, however, include summarizing abstracts, many of which are richly informative. Notable features of PubMed are links to related articles, and increasingly, links to the full-text of the citation. A few of these full-text articles are actually free, but most require a subscription to the journal. A handful of the full-text articles are pay-per-view. Cited sources unavailable electronically can be obtained at medical libraries or through document delivery services.

As stated earlier, the MEDLINE database at PubMed, covers the medical journal literature from the mid-1960's to the present. OLDMEDLINE, a database of older medical journal articles spanning the years 1950 through 1965, has now been added to PubMed and is being continually expanded back in time. If you wish to search only OLDMEDLINE, click on "Limits" under the PubMed search interface, then select "OLDMEDLINE" from the Subsets menu.

Another valuable free resource for attorneys at The National Library of Medicine is the group of databases on toxicology and hazardous chemicals found at TOXNET. If you are working on a case involving environmental or occupational exposure to a possibly dangerous chemical, the toxic effects of a drug, an adverse reproductive outcome due to an environmental or occupational exposure, suspected carcinogens, mutagens, or teratogens, the various databases at TOXNET could be useful. For detailed information about each database, click on the question mark at the right of each listed database on the TOXNET homepage to access its Fact Sheet, then search the appropriate one(s). Carefully read the help pages for the best search results.

Finally, sometime you may want to verify the author, title, publisher, and/or the date of publication of a medical book. (This stuff is called bibliographic information in librarians' lingo). The National Library of Medicine's online catalog, LocatorPlus, can probably help you.

The lengthy and sometimes complicated help pages at The National Library of Medicine are daunting to say the least. There's lots to know in order to do sophisticated, comprehensive searching of the medical literature. Perhaps one or more of the following apply to yourself - you'd rather just do what you do best, you don't have the time or inclination, your own search has got you stumped, or you have that special case that you've simply got to win. MedMatters to the rescue. With many years of medical library research experience, including hundreds of MEDLINE database searches, we have the expertise and experience to thoroughly research prestigious medical journals, textbooks, standards, and guidelines for the authoritative documentation you need. If there's medical literature out there to support your case, we know how to find it.

Indeed, most novice medical literature searches yield incomplete results and cannot measure up to those performed by trained medical information professionals. Don't jeopardize the success of your important medical case with inexpert or haphazard medical literature research. Entrust it to MedMatters.

Build your best possible case. Contact us now by telephone, fax, or e-mail. We can help your client win.

MedMatters™
Expert Medical Literature Research for Attorneys
358 Atkins Avenue
Lancaster, PA 17603-4938
Voice: (717) 397-6701
Fax: (717) 397-0293
E-mail: patmill@medmatters.net