MEDLARS (information retrieval)

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MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) is a computerised biomedical bibliographic retrieval system. It was launched by the National Library of Medicine in 1964 and was the first large scale, computer based, retrospective search service available to the general public. Its first data base was MEDLINE, a byproduct of the computerised production of the printed Index Medicus.^[1]

[edit] Initial development

Since 1879, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has published Index Medicus, a monthly guide to medical articles in thousands of journals. The huge volume of bibliographic citations were manually compiled at a cost of millions of dollars annually. In 1957 the staff of the NLM started to plan the mechanization of the Index Medicus; what was needed was a way to manipulate all this information to produce subsidiary products. By 1960 a detailed specification was prepared and by the spring of 1961 a request for proposals was sent out to 72 companies to develop the system. As a result a contract was awarded to the General Electric Company. The computer (a Minneapolis-Honeywell 800) which was to run MEDLARS was delivered to the NLM in March 1963, and Frank Bradway Rogers (Director of the NLM 1949 to 1963) said at the time "..If all goes well, the January 1964 issue of Index Medicus will be ready to emerge from the system at the end of this year. It may be that this will mark the beginning of a new era in medical bibliography."

MEDLARS cost $3 million to develop and at the time of its completion no other publicly available, fully operational electronic storage and retrieval system of its magnitude existed. The original computer configuration operated from 1964 until its replacement by MEDLARS II in January 1975.^[2][3]

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The main article for this category is MEDLARS (information retrieval).