MEDLINE Ultimate

MEDLINE Ultimate is an update to the EBSCO database MEDLINE Complete, which was billed as an alternative interface for MEDLINE. With MEDLINE Ultimate, EBSCO's promotional materials seem to put more emphasis on its increased journal count (compared with MEDLINE Complete) than on its use as a MEDLINE interface. Like MEDLINE Complete, MEDLINE Ultimate includes primarily academic journals with some gray literature from government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). MEDLINE Ultimate includes MeSH and filters, but the filters are not as well integrated as they are in PubMed. The search interface and indexing also have some quirks that librarians will want to be aware of. The main value-added feature of MEDLINE Ultimate is full-text access to additional journals not available through EBSCO's other two MEDLINE products. For libraries that do not subscribe to any of EBSCO's MEDLINE products and are interested in acquiring full-text access to a larger collection of biomedical journals, MEDLINE Ultimate may be appealing. However, most full text in MEDLINE Ultimate is for journals already available in MEDLINE Complete, so libraries that already subscribe to Complete may find the new product less interesting.