MEDLINE's in-basket beginning to overflow

A contract dispute over data-entry services has put MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's reference service for medical and scientific publications, in a bind. By late April, American Medical News reported, MEDLINE had a backlog of about 60 000 entries and was falling behind by a further 1000 citations a day. A spokesman for the library said the problem was serious because the most current and germane articles were not being identified for researchers and physicians.

The timing of the dispute was made worse by the library's April initiation of an Internet version of Grateful Med, software used to search MEDLINE. MEDLINE indexes 3800 journals from more than 1000 publishers, and last year recorded more than 7.3 million searches.

| CMAJ July 1, 1996 (vol 155, no 1) | News in health and health care |