Since June 1997, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has made its MEDLINE database —more than 9 million references to articles published in 3,800 biomedical journals —available free of charge on the World Wide Web. And with MEDLINE online, searching the medical literature via the Internet has never been easier.

Two web-based products, PubMed and Internet Grateful Med, give you access to MEDLINE, and both are available from the NLM at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/. PubMed offers access to the MEDLINE and GenBank databases only, but it allows use of a variety of search terms, including simple keywords, Boolean terms and medical subject headings. Internet Grateful Med provides access to 14 other databases as well as MEDLINE (including HealthSTAR, which indexes Family Practice Management), but it requires use of medical subject heading search terms. Both search engines provide sets of related articles for each citation and links to publishers' web sites for full-text articles from about 250 journals.