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Abridged Indexed Medicus (AIM) Ceases Publication

Abridged Indexed Medicus (AIM) Ceases Publication. NLM Technical Bulletin. 1997 Sep–Oct;(298):e1.

September 1997 [posted]

The National Library of Medicine's monthly publication Abridged Index Medicus (AIM) will cease following the Volume 28, Number 12, (December 1997) issue.

The Abridged Index Medicus was initiated in 1970 to "afford rapid access to selected biomedical journal literature of immediate interest to the practicing physician" when online services were not readily available. A subset of citations from 119 English language clinical journals indexed for Index Medicus was selected for AIM. The publication was of value to the community over the years; at one point, over two thousand libraries, clinics, colleges, and individuals subscribed to the monthly issues and the annual cumulations. During the past 20 years, however, an increasing number of subscribers have been accessing the data from electronic resources, and subscriptions to the printed product have declined.

Online searchers will still be able to search using A (SB) to limit MEDLINE retrieval to the journals in the AIM subset. Even though the printed AIM is being discontinued, the AIM subset list will continue to exist online in ELHILL. To search the AIM subset in Internet Grateful Med type: /a (sb) in a search box. PubMed, a non-ELHILL search system, does not currently contain a Subset (SB) field or its equivalent; however, this enhancement will be added to PubMed in the near future.

Since there are many demands for Federal dollars, the National Library of Medicine must make some difficult choices concerning the support of existing products versus the improvement and development of new products. NLM Associate Director for Library Operations, Lois Ann Colaianni, realizes that some find the AIM particularly useful; and she will be happy to explore alternatives for this information with such individuals. She may be contacted via e-mail, loisann@nlm.nih.gov.