The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine joined with the library to create the special section. The organizations hope to make data on alternative practices more accessible to physicians, patients and researchers who use PubMed, a service of the National Institutes of Health.
Searches are automatically limited to journals on complementary and alternative medicine.
PubMed is a giant online version of the National Library of Medicine's Medline database, which covers 4500 journals published in the US and overseas. It has 120,000 users each day, conducting about 700 searches per minute, said a library spokesman. In the past, PubMed users could search complementary and alternative journals, but the search was not very specific, even though the database included titles such as Holistic Nursing Practices and the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medical Practices. The library's advisory committee will start evaluating more CAM-specific titles to add to the vast database.