Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

This is a preview of updates coming to the Technical Bulletin's website in April 2026. Return to current site.
Read more about the modernization release schedule in this announcement.
Comment via the yellow feedback button in the lower right hand corner of the page. Contact the NLM Help Desk with any questions or concerns.

This is archived content.

Links may have become inactive over time. Visit Archive-It   to find the original published layout.

PubMed Updates February 2019

Collins M. PubMed Updates February 2019. NLM Tech Bull. 2019 Jan-Feb;(426):e4.

February 06, 2019 [posted]

The National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce the following enhancements to PubMed:

1. Plain Language Summaries

PubMed will display plain language summaries when these summaries are supplied by the publisher. The plain language summary will appear below the abstract. They will also appear in the XML in the <OtherAbstract> field and in the MEDLINE display with the label OAB.

2. Reference Lists

In the past, reference lists have been included only in citation data coming from PubMed Central (PMC) articles. We will now accept reference lists supplied by publishers. Like the PMC reference lists, the publisher-supplied references will be available in the citation XML and they will display in PubMed Labs (see Figure 1).


PubMed screenshot showing references display.
Figure 1: References display in PubMed Labs.

3. Systematic Review [Publication Type]

Systematic Review [PT] was added to the 2019 MeSH vocabulary. NLM applied this publication type retrospectively to systematic review citations in PubMed as part of the annual MeSH update in December 2018. (For additional information, see MEDLINE Data Changes—2019.)

The search strategy for the Systematic Review filter was also updated to focus retrieval on citations to systematic reviews. This filter no longer retrieves other article types including meta-analyses, reviews of clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, consensus development conferences, or guidelines. This change is a response to user requests for a Systematic Review filter that returns only citations to systematic reviews.

Users can apply the Systematic Review filter to a search from the left sidebar or by including systematic[filter] in the search. This filter is also used for Systematic Review retrieval in PubMed Clinical Queries. Please see Search Strategy Used to Create the Systematic Reviews Subset on PubMed for search details.

Please note that the Systematic Review filter will retrieve broader results than searching for systematic review[pt]. The filter strategy also retrieves systematic review citations that have not been assigned the publication type; for example, citations that have not yet undergone MEDLINE indexing.