Notes on the data quality of bibliographic records from the MEDLINE database

Robin Bramley; Stephen Howe; Haralambos Marmanis

doi:10.1093/database/baad070

Notes on the data quality of bibliographic records from the MEDLINE database

Database (Oxford). 2023 Nov 4:2023:baad070. doi: 10.1093/database/baad070.

Authors

Robin Bramley¹, Stephen Howe², Haralambos Marmanis²

Affiliations

¹ Copyright Clearance Center Limited, Ivory House, St Katharine Docks, London E1W 1AT, UK.
² Copyright Clearance Center Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.

Abstract

The US National Library of Medicine has created and maintained the PubMed® database, a collection of over 33.8 million records that contain citations and abstracts from the biomedical and life sciences literature. This database is an important resource for researchers and information service providers alike. As part of our work related to the creation of an author graph for coronaviruses, we encountered several data quality issues with records from a curated subset of the PubMed database called MEDLINE. We provide a data quality assessment for records selected from the MEDLINE database and report on several issues ranging from parsing issues (e.g. character encodings and schema definition weaknesses) to low scores for identifiers against several data quality metrics (e.g. completeness, validity and uniqueness). Database URL https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

MeSH terms

Data Accuracy*
Databases, Factual
MEDLINE
National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
PubMed
United States