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The impact of MEDLARS on the medical library world is not that of the familiar metaphor-the pebble dropped into the pond, casting concentric circles that reach many points on the shore. The impact is no pebble for sure. It is a mighty rock. The waves it will cause will surge and splash for a long time to come. MEDLARS is the great bibliographical breakthrough of our generation.-RALPH T. ESTERQUEST Spoken by Ralph T. Esterquest at a symposium in 1963, 1 these words proved prescient as well as poignant. The National Library of Medicine's MED-LINE (MEDLARS Online) database was the first database to be searched nationwide via value-added telecommunication networks. Now available on the World Wide Web free of charge from the National Library of Medicine and from many other sources, it is the world's most heavily used medical database. MEDLINE is unique in that each reference to the medical literature is indexed under a controlled vocabulary called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). These headings are the keys that unlock the medical literature. MeSH multiplies the usefulness of the MEDLINE database and makes it possible to search the medical
Coletti et al. (Sun,) studied this question.