Pre 1966 Medical Citations Resource Guide

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LSUHSC Libraries Resource Guide
Finding Pre-1966 Medical Citations

Indexes & Books Databases Links Back to Resource Guides

Scope: This guide lists indexes that can be used to find "old" (pre-1966) journal articles and books published before 1966, when MEDLINE (the dataset searched in PubMed) was created. Included here are only those resources generally considered to be the precursors of MEDLINE.

For many years, 1966 was the earliest year for which journal citations were available online. Recently, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has been adding citations from the Current List of Medical Literature and the Cumulated Index Medicus (1950-1965) to the OLDMEDLINE database which can be searched using PubMed. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) have not been added to the older citations so care in searching them is advised. Currently these old citations go back to 1950. NLM plans to continue adding the earlier years. The Index Catalogue of the Surgeon-General's Office, United States Army (1880-1961) has been fully digitized and is searchable using IndexCat.

Indexes & Books
All of these resources are shelved along the wall in the Reference Section of the Library.

To find journal articles:

Index Medicus

1879 - 1899

Bibliographia medica.

1900 - 1902

Index Medicus.

2nd series, 1903 - 1920

3rd series, 1921 - 1927

Quarterly cumulative index to current medical literature.

Spine Title: Quarterly cumulative index

1916 - 1926

Quarterly cumulative index medicus

1927 - 1956

Current list of medical literature

1941 - 1959

Cumulated index medicus.

New series, 1960 - 2000

MEDLINE continues this title.

To find both books and journal articles:

Index catalogue of the library of the Surgeon-general's office, United States army.

1st series, 1880 - 1895, 16 volumes

2nd series, 1896 - 1916, 21 volumes

3rd series, 1918 - 1932, 10 volumes

4th series, 1936 - 1955, 11 volumes (material appearing from 1926 through about 1954)

Military Section, 4th series, Volume XI, pages 289 - 1226 include a plethora of subheadings that extend beyond the main subject.

5th series, 1959 - 1961, 3 volumes

Databases
IndexCAT
The online version of the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office
OLDMEDLINE
The online version of the Current List of Medical Literature and Cumulated Index Medicus (1950-1965)
PubMedCentral (PMC) - A digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. (Not all journals in PMC contain pre-1966 citations) Articles published prior to 1966 and added to PMC generally will be in PMC for several months before appearing in PubMed. Citations and links for these pre-1966 articles are added to PubMed one journal at a time, after all the back issues for that journal have been added to PMC.

Links
National Library of Medicine: Index Medicus Chronology
Information from the NLM on finding older medical journal articles

Created February 2002 by MLM
Revised April 2007 by KEK
Checked October 2008 by DA

Page Maintained by JKL
Last updated on November 26, 2008