IndMED and medIND: NIC's Online Biomedical databases

Abstract

Very few Indian biomedical journals have found place in international databases due to various reasons like delayed / irregular publishing, lack of quality articles, etc. The National Library of Medicine's (NLM, USA) MEDLINE database covers approximately 50 Indian journals. As far as the full-text of these journals are concerned, MEDLINE has only covered three Indian journals. The ICMR-NIC Centre for Biomedical Information, the 17th International MEDLARS Centre has been catering to the biomedical information needs of the medical professionals since 1986. One of the tasks undertaken by the Centre is to meet the glaring and obvious "unavailability" of Indian biomedical research literature. Hence, the Centre took up the challenging task to develop databases of Indian biomedical journals and provide a platform for making this literature available to the Indian as well as international medical community. One such database developed is the IndMED, which covers the bibliographic details from 75 peer reviewed Indian biomedical journals. IndMED has received a lot of recognition and the Centre strives to keep this database at par with the MEDLINE database. The 2nd database being developed is the Online full-text database of Indian biomedical journals, medIND, which would cover the full-text of IndMED journals and serve as one vital resource for all Indian biomedical literature.