PubMed is the backbone of biomedical research in the U.S. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s housed under the NIH and is essentially our national library for public health and medical research information. “PubMed comprises more than 37 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.” It’s literally where research begins.
I work in graduate medical education as a non-clinical faculty member overseeing research activities. I teach new physicians how to read and conduct research, and I use PubMed every single day. I am in good company. PubMed averages over 3.5 million users each weekday. According to Statista, it’s the second most visited government website after the U.S. Postal Service.
Physicians, researchers, students, journalists, and curious citizens alike are all free to query the enormous wealth of information housed by the federal government — and therein lies the rub. Until recently, PubMed was a stalwart resource to us all. However, there are reasons to be extremely concerned about its continued existence.
NIH and Research
In 2022, the Biden administration created a new policy requiring that all tax-payer funded research be publicly accessible by 2025; no paywalls to read papers that were generated by NIH grants. Those papers are housed at — you guessed it — PubMed.
But times are changing. With the Trump administration’s freeze on NIH dollars, research has been disrupted. Work has halted on cutting-edge technologies and therapies. Important findings are not being published. We’re already seeing the impacts of this with the reality of researchers who have been laid off and the pipeline of researchers-in-training being cut. This naturally means that less biomedical research is being produced and published.
PubMed Indexing
With changes in the administration and its policies toward the NIH in particular, it’s important to understand the role that PubMed plays. PubMed has a robust index, which makes it easier to search than many other databases. But journal indexing also serves another purpose: it’s a frontline guard against predatory journals. It establishes a necessary baseline for quality of journals, which helps weed out bad and/or fraudulent research.
Predatory journals, fraudulent articles, and bad-faith actors have infiltrated the scientific discourse.
While PubMed indexing is far from perfect and people using the database need to carefully read and analyze articles using critical thinking skills, the wealth of information contained within the database is invaluable.
The Fate of PubMed
The Trump administration has signaled its hostility to the NIH and research in general, so we should expect that PubMed may be in trouble. There are several ways the administration could interfere with PubMed.
- Make it inaccessible. This is the same fate that many CDC pages have suffered. This one is straightforward: lay off everyone involved in maintaining PubMed and take it offline.
- Stop updating it. Similar to the first one, another approach would be to lay off most people responsible for maintaining PubMed and stop adding new publications to the database. It would essentially be frozen in time, though still available. Those resources available before the freezing date stay available but nothing new is added.
- Change the indexing system for journals. This could be weaponized to punish journals that have published articles that the administration doesn’t like, such as vaccine research, research on certain health policies and populations, and so on.
- Strip the indexing system for journals. This would allow any and every journal to potentially be included in the database. This would be the “flood the zone” method. It’s already difficult to determine the quality of studies and journals. This would remove the limited safeguards we have in place so no quality checks would exist at all.
- Remake it. Delete what you don’t like, only include those journals and articles that you do like, and only update those that agree with your policies and world view.
This is far from a comprehensive list, but they are very possible outcomes for PubMed if the administration continues its current approach to the NIH. The evidence keeps building that we have reason to be worried: the placing of many people who are against evidence-based science into positions of power (e.g., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his hostility toward vaccines); the freezing of NIH dollars; the continued chopping of money and departments from the federal government; and the censoring of government websites, datasets, and other health resources. PubMed could be next.
PubMed is an invaluable resource to every single researcher — and everyone throughout the world. While the Data Rescue Project and others like it are working overtime to try to preserve our datasets, we need to be thinking about and planning for what happens when PubMed is on the chopping block. Without it, we are completely left to our own devices and at the mercy of our personal circumstances. Some will have access to journals through universities, but most people will not. Unfortunately, this isn’t an “if” situation, it’s a “when.”
Katie Suleta, DHSc, MPH, MS, is a trained epidemiologist with a background in infectious diseases and health informatics. She works as a regional director of research in graduate medical education and is a science writer.
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