Fetching Medline entries

MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database. It contains references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.

JabRef can download citations from the Medline database. To use this feature, choose Web search -> Fetch Medline, and the Medline interface will appear in the side pane.

There are two ways of specifying which entries to download:

  1. Enter one or more Medline IDs (separated by comma/semicolon) in the text field.
  2. Enter a set of names and/or words to search for. You can use the operators and and or and parentheses to refine your search expression. See Medline/OVID operators for full description.
  3. Examples:
    1. May [au] AND Anderson [au]
    2. Anderson RM [au] HIV [ti]
    3. Valleron [au] 1988:2000[dp] HIV [ti]
    4. Valleron [au] AND 1987:2000[dp] AND (AIDS [ti] OR HIV[ti])
    5. Anderson [au] AND Nature [ta]
    6. Population [ta]
In both cases, press Enter or the Fetch button. If you use a text search, you will be prompted with the number of entries found, and given a choice of how many to download.

The entries fetched will be added to your currently active database.

Using a Proxy Server

If you need to use an http proxy server, pass the server name and port number to java at runtime.

java -Dhttp.proxyHost="hostname" -Dhttp.proxyPort="portnumber"

These environment settings are documented in the Oracle J2SE documentation.