This guide has been created in response to developments in the United States which have come about since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Within the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), this includes the mass firing of employees, plans for significantly reduced funding to agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), organisational restructures, and a dramatic change in priorities including moving away from vaccine research and projects deemed to be aligned with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Additional changes include the removal and modification of federal webpages and datasets.
This upheaval and change within the U.S government may result in loss of material from resources such as the hugely influential and internationally-utilised database PubMed, which is produced by HHS, or changes to the reliability of its indexing policies. It is possible that the site infrastructure may become increasingly unstable, or we may encounter intermittent or complete loss of access (though this is unlikely). More generally, the future quality and volume of healthcare research coming out of the U.S is likely to be affected, which in turn will affect the content of databases like PubMed.
For further analysis of the effect of U.S policy on information retrieval and potential alternatives to PubMed and ClinicalTrials,gov, IQWig (the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care) have produced a detailed document, available here.
Update: as of 02/10/2025, as a result of the U.S government shutdown, PubMed now has a notice stating that, "because of a lapse in government funding, 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."
University of Exeter LibGuide is licensed under CC BY 4.0
