Statistical Profile: MEDLINE® Use by Physicians

Note: Statistics refer to use of MEDLARS® online databases on the NLM system only.

MEDLARS searches in FY 1992: 5,567,000

Principal Reasons for Searches:

                                    Physician's
                     Users           Responses
                 (1985 Sample)     (1987 Survey)
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Patient Care         37%                49%
Research             27%                35%
Education            15%                14%
Management           7%                 1%
Regulation           2%                 <1%
Other                11%                1%
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Domestic Billed Accounts (excluding students):

                    12/31/86  12/31/88  12/31/90  12/31/92
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Total                7,733     15,580     23,591   45,242
----------------------------------------------------------
Patient Care M.D.'s
(personal accounts)  1,655     4,275       8,065   17,148
----------------------------------------------------------
Percent of total      21%       27%        34%      38%
----------------------------------------------------------

The number of direct care physicians with personal accounts at NLM has doubled in the last two years.

Although other physicians who provide patient care have access to MEDLINE through their medical library's use of NLM's system via commercial vendor or local institution systems, the total number of doctors who use MEDLINE is as yet only a small fraction of the more than 500,000 physicians in the country.

Student Accounts

Reduced rate student codes became available in October 1987 to individual students and to institutions wishing to obtain blocks of codes for use by their students.

As of December 31, 1992: Domestic student codes

        Individual              1,033
        Institutional           6,659
        Total                   7,692

Forty-six (or 37%) of U.S. medical schools have NLM student codes for at least some of their students. Other institutions (e.g., teaching hospitals, schools of pharmacy) also have student codes.

Approximately 35 universities that lease MEDLINE directly from the NLM mount the data on local computer systems and provide access to students via that route.

GRATEFUL MED®

A major reason for the growth in direct use of MEDLINE by physicians and medical students was the introduction in 1986 of Grateful Med, a microcomputer search package that allows users without special training to search MEDLINE and other NLM databases quickly and cheaply. Grateful Med is available for both IBM (and compatibles) and Macintosh computers.

As of December 31, 1992:

        53,209 copies distributed by NTIS
        71% of all searchers using MEDLINE
            each month use Grateful Med
        85% of physicians with search accounts
            are known to use Grateful Med

NLM HyperDOC / MEDLINE FactSheet / April 1994