title: What happened to our free bioethics search service? The terrible and premature death of BIOETHICSLINE.
abstract: BIOETHICSLINE, in existence from 1973 thorough 2000, was a bibliographic database covering the English-language literature on bioethical issues. It reflected the cross-disciplinary field of bioethics. During 2001, the National Library of Medicine is expected to dismantle BIOETHICSLINE and incorporate its data into two of their other databases, PubMed and LOCATORplus. Once this is completed, BIOETHICSLINE, as a unified database, will be discontinued. The users of BIOETHICSLINE will no longer have access to this important and useful resource specifically targeted to the vocabulary and cross-disciplinary nature of the bioethics literature. As a scholar and student of bioethics, and as a trained and former reference librarian, I feel it is important to examine these changes and their consequences. There are good reasons to integrate BIOETHICSLINE into these other databases on the NLM Gateway, but I argue that, in addition this integration, BIOETHICSLINE should be continued as a distinct database.
authors.affiliation: University of Pennsylvania, USA.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Plaza
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D001675:Bioethics; D002381:Catalogs, Library; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D008091:Literature; D009317:National Library of Medicine (U.S.); D039781:PubMed; D014481:United States; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled