The National Library of Medicine database MEDLINE/PubMed is going back in time. MEDLINE/PubMed now offers access to more than 60,000 articles indexed in the 1947 Current List of Medical Literature (CLMN).

Created in 1971, MEDLINE initially contained citations to journal articles published mostly from 1966 onward. But in 1996, NLM began to expand its retrospective coverage with the addition of more than 307,000 citations, originally published in the 1964 and 1965 Cumulated Index Medicus.

“Some contemporary medical questions can only be answered by consulting the older literature,” says NLM Director Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD. “Our goal is to go back as far as World War II, at least, to make older, printed indexes electronically searchable.”

With the addition of the 1947 citations, the MEDLINE/PubMed subset now contains over 20 million citations produced during 63 years of indexing of biomedical literature.