The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has announced that starting in early September 2010, it will accept any UTF-8 character in the Latin (Roman) and Greek scripts as well as mathematical and other symbols commonly found in biomedical literature for its newly created MEDLINE records. Since the inception of MEDLINE, NLM has limited the characters used to those typed from a standard US keyboard and a small set of frequently used diacritics.
The most notable difference is the addition of Greek characters to the database. Other scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean are not supported. Previously, NLM spelled out Greek letters, for instance, replacing β (Unicode 03B2) with beta. PubMed users will now able to search for these characters either by copying and pasting the text from an online source or by spelling out the letter. Both approaches retrieve the same set of citations.
MEDLINE is the US National Library of Medicine's (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains over 18 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). The great majority of journals are selected for MEDLINE based on the recommendation of the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC), an NIH-chartered advisory committee of external experts analogous to the committees that review NIH grant applications.
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