National Library of Health Sciences - Terkko

Medic - the Finnish reference database of health sciences

Medic is a Finnish health science database established in 1978.

The database is produced by Terkko, the National Library of Health Sciences. It contains references to Finnish medical and health science literature: articles, books, dissertations and reports published in Finland and not included in international databases.

In autumn 2007 the database contained over 90 000 references. Approximately 4000 references are entered annually.

As Medic is a native Finnish database, most of the publications as well as the database interface are in Finnish. Each reference contains English and Finnish Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).

Subject matter

Medic contains references to Finnish health related publications. It includes medical, dental and nursing publications. Furthermore, life science literature relevant to medicine is entered, as well as publications of interest from other fields, for example law and philosophy.

The main reference selection principle is that the publication must have been published in Finland and is not entered in international databases (some exceptions to this rule). Publication language is irrelevant in the selection process.

Publication types

Publication types entered in Medic are

• Articles

In addition to scientific periodicals, articles are selected from periodicals published by occupational and patient societies. At the moment (Fall 2006) articles are selected from 86 periodicals.

Inclusion criteria:
Original articles, review articles, case studies and biographies are included.
Consideration is used with following article types: project descriptions, conference proceedings, editorials, letters, news and interviews.

• Books
• Book chapters
• Dissertations (medical, dental, nursing) and master’s thesis (nursing)
• Research institute and government agency reports.
  

Reference structure

The reference consists of the publication´s bibliographic information, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH & FinMeSH), annotations and key words if needed. If the publication is available in the Internet, a link to the fulltext is also provided.

Example reference:

Indexing

Medical Subject Headings

The indexing language used in Medic the US National Library of Medicine´s Medical Subject Headings.

Since 2003 Medic users have been able to locate English Subject Headings for their searches with the help of FinMeSH terms (MeSH terms translated to Finnish). FinMeSH is provided by
Finnish Medical Society Duodecim.

Subheadings
For technical reasons, subheadings are not connected to Subject Headings. The use of subheadings can be described as “floating subject headings”. In the example reference subheadings are marked with an asterisk (*).

Key words
When cosidered essential from an information retrieval perspective, indexers can add additional free key words.

Medic licences

Organizational licenses (educational institutions, research institutes, public libraries etc.) allows organization´s members and/or students to use the database. The yearly fee for educational institutions and research institutes is based on organization´s FTE.
The fee for public libraries is based on the number of inhabitants of the area.
Private persons can also buy access to the database.
From the beginning of the year 2006 Medic has been also a part of FinELib-consortium resources (Finnish National Electronic Library).

For more information about Medic, please contact: terkko-tietopalvelu@helsinki.fi

Medic search interface and instructions in Finnish only

• Search
• Medical Subject Headings (FinMeSH and MeSH)
• Journals