The completeness of MEDLINE for papers published and abstracted in the Journal of Emergency Medicine.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether MEDLINE, a common source for reviewing the medical literature, is complete with regard to referencing papers published and abstracted in The Journal of Emergency Medicine (JEM) over a 10-year period. In that time, 1178 abstracts and 843 original contributions were included in JEM. All papers were reviewed and classified as either a review of subject, case report with review of literature, editorial, or prospective or retrospective original research. Results showed 98.5% of all original work published in JEM and 99.74% of all abstracts referenced in JEM were found in MEDLINE, thus supporting the hypothesis that MEDLINE is a complete and thorough database for current literature.