PubMed® Maintenance for EDATs on Older Citations

On PubMed® records, the Entrez date (EDAT) is the date the citation was added to the database. An exception to this is when we add citations that have a publication date prior to September of 1997. For these records the Entrez Date is set to the Publication Date. This is done because PubMed’s default display of search retrieval is in reverse Entrez date order (last in, first out) and we recognize users' preference to see currently published citations at the top of their retrieval.

There are approximately 300,000 older citations in PubMed that do not follow this exception. We will change the EDAT on these citations to reflect the publication date. The MeSH Date (MHDA) will remain unchanged.

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