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MEDLINEplus Selection Guidelines

MEDLINEplus is designed to help you find appropriate, authoritative health information. To do this, we provide access to information produced by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, such as searches of MEDLINE, our database that indexes medical literature, and ClinicalTrials.gov, the database of research studies from the National Institutes of Health. We also provide you with a database of full-text drug information and an illustrated medical encyclopedia.

In addition, MEDLINEplus contains pages that link to other web sites. Our emphasis is on organizing the full-text publications produced by the NIH Institutes and other federal government organizations. We also link to other web sites. The selection guidelines we use in evaluating links to web pages are listed below.

• Quality, authority and accuracy of content
  • The source of the content is established, respected and dependable. A list of advisory board members or consultants is published on the site.
  • The information provided is appropriate to the audience level, well-organized and easy to use.
  • Information is from primary resources (i.e., textual material, abstracts, web pages).
  • Lists of links are evaluated/reviewed/quality-filtered.
• The purpose of the web page is educational and is not selling a product or service. Most content is available at no charge.
• Availability and maintenance of the web page
  • The web site is consistently available.
  • Links from the site are maintained.
  • The source for the contents of the web page(s) and the entity responsible for maintaining the web site (webmaster, organization, creator of the content) is clear.
  • Information is current or an update date is included.
  • Registration is not required to view most of the information on the site.
• Special features
  • The site provides unique information to the topic with a minimum of redundancy and overlap between resources.
  • The site contains special features such as graphics/diagrams, glossary, or other unique information.
  • The content of the site is accessible to persons with disabilities.