New York, NY — February 28, 2001 - The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine, the official journal of the Partnership for Women's Health at Columbia University, has been selected by the National Library of Medicine to be indexed and included in its worldwide database, Index Medicus and MEDLINE. In addition, Elsevier Science of the Netherlands has selected the journal for indexing in Excerpta Medica and its database, EMBASE.

The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine is the first journal specifically geared toward exploring the impact of gender on normal physiology and on the pathophysiology of disease. It includes original scientific articles reporting differences between the sexes, as well as review papers aimed at the practicing physician, which provide in-depth and clinically applicable information aimed at improving patient care.

"Gender-specific features of human biology exist in every organ system of the body. Unfortunately, the medical community has focused insufficient resources on or attention to these differences," says Marianne J. Legato, MD, FACP, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine and founder and director of the Partnership for Women’s Health at Columbia. Dr. Legato has recently joined the Working Group of Biomedical Journal Editors to Promote Publication of Original Research in Which Gender is an Important Variable. She and her colleague Denise Faustman, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and editor of the Journal of Women’s Health, have taken the lead in drafting guidelines for editors of biomedical journals for publishing studies that have carefully looked at the importance of gender as a factor in the data reported.

"As researchers study the differences between the sexes, both in biology and disease, it becomes even more important to disseminate this information among the medical and lay communities," continued Dr. Legato. "Being indexed in the MEDLINE and EMBASE databases will help the Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine reach a much larger international audience."

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) uses an advisory committee, the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee, composed of authorities knowledgeable in the field of biomedicine, such as physicians, researchers, educators, editors, health science librarians, and historians, to review and recommend the journal titles NLM should index. Scientific merit of a journal's content is the primary consideration in selecting journals for indexing. The validity, importance, originality, and contribution to the coverage of the field of the overall contents of each title are the key factors considered in recommending a title for indexing.

Index Medicus and its online counterpart, MEDLINE, (the principal online bibliographic citation database of NLM's MEDLARS® system) are used internationally to provide access to the world's biomedical journal literature. Users of the MEDLARS indexes are researchers, health care practitioners, educators, administrators, and students. Citations from the articles indexed, the indexing terms, and the English abstract printed in the journal will be included in the databases.

Elsevier Science partners with academic and corporate institutions to develop and deliver information solutions to more than nine million scientists and researchers working in all fields of science. EMBASE, the Excerpta Medica database, is a current and comprehensive pharmacological and biomedical bibliographic database. Renowned for its extensive coverage of the drug-related literature, the database gathers information from more than 4,000 journals published in 70 countries. EMBASE contains more than eight million records from 1974 to the present, with 445,000 records added annually. More than 80% of recent records contain full author abstracts.