PubMed

Search tool

National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), within the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) · United States

Visit the source site · Audited 2026-10-14

Who pays for it

PubMed is free and federally operated by NLM and NIH; a PubMed-specific budget or industry revenue was not identified, so amounts are unverified.

Status: Search tool

PubMed is a search and indexing platform, not the publisher or author of most indexed papers. Inclusion does not rate article quality or mean NLM endorses a paper, so SafeMomma cites the study itself rather than PubMed as evidence.

How SafeMomma uses it

Used to find studies and publication notices; citations point to the underlying study or notice, because PubMed inclusion is not a quality rating.

The audit

Who controls it: NCBI at NLM, within NIH, develops and maintains PubMed. It is a search and index platform, not the publisher or author of most included papers, and NLM does not review or endorse each article after inclusion.
Money: PubMed is free and federally operated by NLM and NIH. A PubMed-specific budget, industry revenue, or sponsorship was not identified; its main funding exposure is government operations and budgets.
Conflict rules: MEDLINE journal applicants must provide links to editorial, peer-review, and conflict policies, but that does not ensure that every PubMed record has a conflict statement. Funding and conflict metadata can be incomplete, and publishers maintain the scientific record.
Method: PubMed Help explains search behavior, indexing, filters, and limits. MEDLINE journal selection applies only to MEDLINE, not every PubMed item; PubMed can also include preprints that have not been peer reviewed, and inclusion is not a quality grade.
Dates on its pages: PubMed continually indexes records and publishers supply updates, corrections, and retractions; its User Guide was last updated September 30, 2026, but no average update lag was verified.
Political exposure: PubMed had a brief outage over the weekend of March 2, 2025; Nature reported service restoration and no evidence the outage was deliberate, while the technical cause remained unclear. On April 8, 2025, Amsterdam UMC explained search-count differences largely through indexing and full-text methods and reported no evidence of intentional MeSH censorship.
Money exposure: No industry sponsorship, paid registry, or product-sales model was identified in the reviewed PubMed or NLM pages. Its funding is governmental; a PubMed-specific appropriation and any private contributions remain unverified.
Track record: The codeine backtest used PubMed records to distinguish the 2006 Lancet paper's Expression of Concern from retractions of two related Canadian columns. This illustrates PubMed's value for locating publication notices, not for rating study quality.

Where this comes from

Incentive exposure describes pressure from money or politics, not whether the source is right. Funding alone does not show influence.

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