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What is PubMed?

Diagram visualizing the relative sizes of PubMed (over 32 million citations), Medline (over 27 million citations), and PubMed Central (over 6 million citations)PubMed is a database of over 30 million biomedical article citations maintained by the National Library of Medicine.
MEDLINE is the largest subset of PubMed, containing over 27 million citations which have been indexed by the National Library of Medicine and have had Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms applied.
PubMed Central (PMC) a separate database of 5.3 million citations composed of citations (and usually full text) for articles which are free and can be accessed by anyone (i.e. not restricted by a publisher pay-wall).  PMC content is searchable in PubMed.

It is important to note that PubMed is a citation database, not a full text database, so when searching PubMed, you are searching the citation information contained in these fields only, not the entire text of the article.

For more information, see:

Searching the New PubMed