Greenberg Stephen J, Gallagher Patricia E
History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA.
J Med Libr Assoc. 2009 Apr;97(2):108-13. doi: 10.3163/1536-5050.97.2.007.
The systematic indexing of medical literature by the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (now the National Library of Medicine) has been called "America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge." In the 1870s, the library launched two indexes: the Index Medicus and the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office. Index Medicus is better remembered today as the forerunner of MEDLINE, but Index Medicus began as the junior partner of what the library saw as its major publication, the Index-Catalogue. However, the Index-Catalogue had been largely overlooked by many medical librarians until 2004, when the National Library of Medicine released IndexCat, the online version of Index-Catalogue. Access to this huge amount of material raised new questions: What was the coverage of the Index-Catalogue? How did it compare and overlap with the Index Medicus?
Over 1,000 randomly generated Index Medicus citations were cross-referenced in IndexCat.
Inclusion, form, content, authority control, and subject headings were evaluated, revealing that the relationship between the two publications was neither simple nor static through time. In addition, the authors found interesting anomalies that shed light on how medical literature was selected and indexed in "America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge."
美国军医局图书馆（现美国国立医学图书馆）对医学文献进行的系统编目被称为“美国对医学知识的最大贡献”。在19世纪70年代，该图书馆推出了两个索引：《医学索引》和《军医局图书馆索引目录》。如今，《医学索引》作为医学在线数据库（MEDLINE）的前身更为人所知，但在当时，该图书馆认为其主要出版物是《索引目录》，而《医学索引》只是其附属部分。然而，直到2004年美国国立医学图书馆发布《索引目录》的在线版本IndexCat之前，许多医学图书馆员基本都忽视了《索引目录》。获取如此大量的资料引发了新的问题：《索引目录》的覆盖范围是怎样的？它与《医学索引》相比如何，又有哪些重叠之处？
在IndexCat中对1000多条随机生成的《医学索引》引用进行交叉引用。
对收录情况、形式、内容、权威控制和主题词进行了评估，结果表明这两种出版物之间的关系既不简单，也并非随时间一成不变。此外，作者们发现了一些有趣的异常情况，这些情况有助于揭示在“美国对医学知识的最大贡献”中，医学文献是如何被选择和编目的。
