Sadly, the National Library of Medicine will be retiring its PedMed Health website on October 31st, 2018 (Halloween is an interesting choice for shutting down a helpful website) as to “consolidate” similar resources and make information easier to find.
While this might not seem like that big of a deal, I’m concerned about the information they may no longer provide; what will be missing from “the same or similar content” they provide via PubMed, MedlinePlus, and Bookshelf?
“PubMed Health content falls into two general categories: consumer health resources and systematic reviews/comparative effectiveness research (CER). A similar range of consumer health information to that in PubMed Health is available from NLM’s MedlinePlus, while the systematic reviews and CER in PubMed Health are searchable through PubMed, which links to the full text (when available) in Bookshelf, journals, and/or PubMed Central.
PubMed has always indexed NLM’s systematic reviews/CER, so if you typically searched for that content via PubMed you would conduct your searches as usual. For those not familiar with using PubMed to search for systematic reviews, one simple way to do so is to enter your query in the search box and then limit the results to systematic reviews by marking the check box for them in “Customize” under “Article types,” located in the top left corner of the search results page (see Figure 1).”1
Will this now be too cumbersome for lay people to use? And again, what information or studies might they leave out? And who gets to decide what doesn’t get put back in?
According to NLM, they are still figuring out some of the details of phasing out PubMed Health. Trust us, when we have more information, we will make it available to you.
