For more than 100 years, before PubMed was freely accessible via the Internet, the medical literature was commonly accessed via Index Medicus, the first comprehensive index of journal articles available through the Library of Medicine. Finding the perfect reference often necessitated hours of paging through the “big red book,” followed by a trip to the stacks, and perhaps in the later years, a trip to the copy machine. The required effort constituted a form of activation energy that naturally restricted the numbers of articles retrieved to only the most relevant and pertinent to the argument at hand. It also encouraged a careful and thoughtful reading and critique of each paper cited.
The introduction of PubMed in the mid-1990s revolutionized the process of finding and retrieving relevant literature. With much of the drudgery and inconvenience gone, long lists of potentially important publications could be compiled quickly and easily on any computer ...
