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Print Article: KA-03247

What is the difference between PubMed Central (PMC) and PubMed?

PubMed is a database of citations and abstracts for more than 39 million articles. PubMed Central® (PMC) is an electronic archive of full-text journal articles, offering free access to its contents. PMC contains more than 11 million articles, most of which have a corresponding entry in PubMed.

PubMed does not have citations for certain types of PMC material, such as book reviews, that are considered out of scope for PubMed. These items constitute a small portion of the total PMC collection and there are no current plans to include them in PubMed.

For more details about the two databases see the following: