MEDLINE
The National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database of biomedical journal articles, indexed with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms. MEDLINE is the core component of PubMed. MEDLINE indexing ensures articles are systematically tagged with standardised subject terms for accurate searching.
Technical Context
MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is the NLM's premier bibliographic database, containing over 28 million references to journal articles from approximately 5,200 journals selected for biomedical relevance. MEDLINE's distinguishing feature is MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing — trained indexers assign standardised subject terms to each article, enabling precise topic-based searching. MeSH terms relevant to peptide drug searching include: 'Peptides/therapeutic use', 'GLP-1 Receptor Agonists', 'Somatostatin/analogs & derivatives', specific compound names as MeSH headings or supplementary concepts. MEDLINE's journal selection criteria ensure a baseline quality standard. Journals must pass a scientific quality review by the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee. MEDLINE is accessed primarily through PubMed, which adds non-MEDLINE content and enhanced search features.