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Bibliographic Services Division (BSD)

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Index Section

The Index Section is responsible for the indexing, editing, and citation creation for journal literature for MEDLINE®. Indexing involves analyzing and assigning to each article descriptive headings selected from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®), the controlled vocabulary.

The Index Section also performs gene indexing by creating annotated links between PubMed citations and records for genes and proteins in the Entrez Gene database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Much of the initial indexing is obtained from firms under contract to the Library to index journal articles and from International MEDLARS Centers. To ensure the integrity of the database, members of the Section review the indexing done outside NLM for accuracy and consistency and correct errors detected by users of MEDLARS products and services.

For more information about MEDLINE indexing, see:

The Indexing Process

Indexing Statistics

Journals Information

Data Policies