MEDLINE/PubMed End-of-Year Activities

he National Library of Medicine (NLM) is now involved in MEDLINE year-end processing activities. These include changing the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH^®) on existing MEDLINE citations to agree with the 2003 version of MeSH, and other global changes such as changes to journal title abbreviations or Supplementary Concept Substance Names. Check the next issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin for an article about 2003 MeSH changes.

During end-of-year activities, NLM's schedule for adding indexed citations to MEDLINE and PubMed is temporarily interrupted. Once the end-of-year activities are complete (tentatively targeted for December 2002), the normal MEDLINE/PubMed update schedule will resume, and PubMed will use 2003 vocabulary in the MeSH translation tables and MeSH Browser as well as in the citation data. [Editor's Note: This schedule has been changed. End-of-year activities will be completed on November 26, 2002. For further information please see the Technical Note, MEDLINE^® /PubMed^® End-of-Year Activities: Schedule Change. NLM Tech Bull. 2002 Sep-Oct;(328):e1, in this issue.]

Indexed Citations
On October 30, 2002, NLM expects to temporarily halt the addition of new, fully-indexed MEDLINE citations to PubMed. NLM indexing staff will continue to index citations but these records will be held and not added to PubMed until the normal update schedule resumes.

In-Process Citations
During end-of-year activities, "in-process" citations will continue to be added to PubMed. As a result, the number of PubMed records labeled [PubMed - in process] will temporarily increase. These citations do not have MeSH terms, and the bibliographic citation data (e.g., pagination values) have not been checked for accuracy.

Searching
A search limiting terms to fields affected by indexing, e.g., robotics [mh] AND review [pt], does not retrieve in-process or publisher-supplied records. (See a list of fields added or supplemented during indexing).

Therefore, during end-of-year activities when we are not adding completed, indexed citations to MEDLINE/PubMed, such searches, including those stored in the Cubby, may not retrieve new records for some weeks. To retrieve new, in-process records during this time, consider not limiting searches to affected fields, e.g., robotics review. (Note that the search terms are not tagged in this example.)

By December, the in-process citations that are within the scope of MEDLINE that have been indexed since October 30, 2002 will be replaced as indexed citations with 2003 MeSH terms, Publication Types, etc. Also, the citation bibliographic data will have been checked for accuracy. Searches, including Cubby Stored Searches, containing tagged search terms will then retrieve all applicable MEDLINE records.

Corrections on Hold
Also as of October 30, 2002, corrected citations for MEDLINE journals (e.g., because an author name was misspelled) will not be added to MEDLINE. NLM staff continue to correct citations and these will replace the incorrect citations in MEDLINE when the normal update schedule resumes.