Guides & Bibliographies

MedLine Guide

Introduction

MedLine, created by the National Library of Medicine, MedLine provides authoritative information on the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and the general health care system. MedLine has links to full text of over 350 journals. Also, included are abstracts and indexing for over 3,800 current biomedical journals. Many of the files are in the PDF format and require the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the articles.

MedLine is available to current UT Arlington faculty & students at this webaddress:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-medlineebsco.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in MedLine is an asterisk (*), and when this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command "prostat*" will have the computer search engine look for all possible endings of this word. It should find, "prostate," "prostatitis," "prostatism," and "prostatectomy."

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(man or men or male*) AND (eating disorder* OR anorexi* or bulimi*)

The first part of this statement will find material about men. The second part will look for the words associated with eating disorders. The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to look for information about eating disorders in men.

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