Alternatives to United States NLM Resources

NLM stands for the National Library of Medicine. It is the world's largest biomedical library, and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a US government agency for biomedical and public health research. NIH, in turn, is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), an executive department of the U.S federal government.

The National Library of Medicine produce and maintain a number of free-to-access resources which are heavily used within the health sciences. These include (among others):

• PubMed is maintained by NCBI, and largely consists of the database Medline. It covers all aspects of human medicine and related biomedical research, including comprehensive information on drugs and toxicology, clinical medicine, biotechnology and bioengineering, health affairs, dentistry, psychiatry and forensic medicine. It is a key resource for academic research within the health sciences. Access to PubMed is free, but not all articles hosted on it are publicly available.
  
• PubMed Central (PMC) is a digital repository for open access biomedical and life sciences articles. All material in this repository is freely available to the public.
  
• ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry of clinical trials from countries across the world.

For further guidance on the differences between Medline, PubMed and PMC, see this article.