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MEDLINE® UI/PubMed® ID Matcher Available on NCBI's E-Utilities Web Site

MEDLINE® UI/PubMed® ID Matcher Available on NCBI's E-Utilities Web Site. NLM Technical Bulletin. 2003 Sep–Oct;(334):e1.

October 07, 2003 [posted]

In the July-August edition of the NLM Technical Bulletin, the Technical Notes announced that the MEDLINE Unique Identifier was to be discontinued and that the discontinuation process would be implemented in two stages. (Please see Technical Notes. NLM Tech Bull. 2003 Jul-Aug;(333):e1.)

In early September 2003, the first stage of the process was carried out, namely, the positions of the MEDLINE Unique Identifier (UI) field and the PubMed Identifier (PMID) field on the MEDLINE display format in PubMed were switched, so that the PMID now displays first. As mentioned in the July-August Technical Note, when MEDLINE is updated with 2004 MeSH vocabulary in December 2003, the PMID will be the only unique number used in PubMed and on records distributed to licensees.

As promised, NLM has recently made a MEDLINE UI/PubMed ID Matcher available online, in order to help users make changes to projects and services that currently depend on the UI field. OLDMEDLINE UI's can be matched using this utility as well. This utility can be reached from the PubMed sidebar, by clicking on E-Utilities, or by going directly to the Web page. [8/24/2010: The link to the MEDLINE/PMID Matcher was removed because it is no longer available.]