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Alternatives to United States NLM Resources

Introduction

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." However, please do note that this does not mean that PubMed has been officially defunded. This notice is because of the government shutdown more broadly, and a similar notice appeared on PubMed during the last shutdown in 2018. 

This guide provides:
An overview of notable events and changes within HHS and other federal departments.
Explanations of U.S government structure and operations, alongside information on how PubMed works and is maintained.
An overview of the influence of the database PubMed on other widely-used academic databases and platforms.
A list of open access and subscription resources which can be used alongside or as an alternative to PubMed.
A list of websites and projects which are capturing removed or modified datasets and webpages.
Guidance on evaluating information sources.
General information on decolonising literature searching.
 Further reading including news articles, other university guides, and websites.
This guide is being continually updated and so content may change. It was last updated on 07/11/2025. The following changes/additions were made:
 
  • New articles added to Further Reading -> Articles -> "October" and "November".
  • Additions to "Overview of Events and Changes" -> "Changes within HHS" -> "Information Censorship" to include information about the firing of editorial staff at the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease, and concerns about the CDC journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
  • Additions to "Overview of Events and Changes" -> "Changes within HHS" -> "Staff and organisational structure changes" to note the firing of ACIP support staff.
  • Additions to "Overview of Events and Changes" -> "Changes within HHS" -> "Attacks on Vaccines" to include summary of BMJ article reporting discussion at the World Vaccine Congress on the effect of US policy on vaccine hesitancy in Europe, as well as a negative impact on vaccine development and technology investment.

    See previous updates here

Isobel Eddyshaw

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Isobel Eddyshaw (Exeter)
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