BIOETHICSLINE: an overview for searchers.

The BIOETHICSLINE File (BIOETHICS) is a bibliographic database produced at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, and made available online through the the National Library of Medicine's MEDLARS system. BIOETHICS provides multidisciplinary coverage of the ethical, legal, and public policy aspects of medicine, health care, and biomedical and behavioral research. This article describes the content and development of the database, suggests effective strategies for searching, and presents illustrative searches. An appendix lists selected major indexing terms (Keywords) from the controlled vocabulary of the Bioethics Thesaurus.