Content area
PubMed, the life sciences search engine maintained by the US government and relied upon by researchers worldwide, is still performing its basic automated functions during the federal shutdown, but new journals are not currently being added to its index. A shutdown warning posted on the PubMed homepage after the US government shutdown on 1 October spread unease through the research community. “Because of a lapse in government funding,” it said, “the information on this website may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted.” [...]last month, the NIH described the committee as one that “consists of fifteen members, including scientists (ie, PhD or MD level researchers and physicians) and medical librarians.”
PubMed, the life sciences search engine maintained by the US government and relied upon by researchers worldwide, is still performing its basic automated functions during the federal shutdown, but new journals are not currently being added to its index.
A shutdown warning posted on the PubMed homepage after the US government shutdown on 1 October spread unease through the research community. “Because of a lapse in government funding,” it said, “the information on this website may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted.”1
The same warning has been posted on many other web pages run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was also posted on the PubMed page during the 35 day shutdown of 2018-19.
PubMed searches are automated, however, and most of the work of uploading new articles is done by the journals that publish them. So articles that have been published since the shutdown began are still being added to PubMed if the journal that published them was already indexed. Automated systems at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) give such articles a Medline citation and assign it a Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) descriptor, a set of keywords that enable it to be found on PubMed.
One service has been affected. With NIH furloughing nearly 80% of its 21 000 strong staff during the shutdown, the task that requires the most human input—considering whether new journal applicants are fit to receive a Medline citation and be indexed on PubMed—has been paused. When federal agencies were asked to identify essential services at the shutdown’s outset, the NIH named the Medline service.
An NIH spokesperson told The BMJ, “Medline is an excepted service, so automated processes—including publisher supplied record additions via PMDM (PubMed Data Management) and automated MeSH indexing—continue as usual, keeping PubMed searches functional and current. Some manual updates and interlibrary loan services, such as Docline, may be delayed. The Trump administration remains committed to reopening the government.”
Key committee scrapped
If and when the indexing of new journals resumes after the shutdown, it will do so under a new system, one that was quietly imposed by the Trump administration in the weeks before federal workers were furloughed.
PubMed has effectively functioned as a gatekeeper of journal quality, as the indexing process, led by the NLM, has kept out predatory journals and those with inadequate peer review. This process has been guided by the recommendations of a federal advisory committee, the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee.
Until last month, the NIH described the committee as one that “consists of fifteen members, including scientists (ie, PhD or MD level researchers and physicians) and medical librarians.” But, on 8 September, an NLM technical bulletin entitled “Modernising journal selection at the National Library of Medicine” said that the committee had been terminated.2
The new guidance says: “At least two consultants, usually one scientist (ie, doctoral level researchers or physicians) and one medical librarian review each journal. Their recommendations are taken into consideration by NLM in reaching a final decision on selecting a title for inclusion in Medline.”3
The removal of expert independent committees from health and science decision making has been a feature of the Trump administration.4
The new system is not yet operating, owing to the shutdown, and the coming change has seemingly only been publicly announced in the NLM technical bulletin.
Fears of a potentially diminished PubMed under the Trump administration have spurred the development of alternative databases abroad. Should PubMed ever cease functioning, all of its abstracts, and all of the full articles now stored on PubMed Central, are already searchable on Europe PMC.4 But Europe PMC’s access to new PubMed data is dependent on a partnership agreement with its US counterpart that could be cancelled by the Trump administration.
Germany’s national library of medicine, ZB MED, announced plans in May to build an “open, reliable, and sustainable alternative to the PubMed database,” called the OLSPub (Open Life Science Publication database) project. An overview of that project’s progress was published earlier this month.5
1 L Taylor. “Unprecedented” US government shutdown could force mass furlough of health workers. BMJ2025;391:r2073. 10.1136/bmj.r2073.
2 Modernizing Journal Selection at the National Library of Medicine. NLM Technical Bulletin, 8 September 2025. NLM Tech Bull2025;e3. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so25/so25_medline_selection.html.
3 National Library of Medicine. Journal selection for Medline. 8 Sep 2025. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline/medline_journal_selection.html
4 L Taylor. RFK Jr dismisses entire CDC vaccine advisory panel. BMJ2025;389:r1206. 10.1136/bmj.r1206.
5 Förstner KU, Albers M. Creating an open, community-driven and resilient data base of life science literature metadata. Journal of EAHIL (European Association for Health Information and Libraries), 1 October 2025. 10.32384/jeahil21688https://ojs.eahil.eu/JEAHIL/article/view/688
Copyright BMJ Publishing Group LTD 2025