Following an agreement signed in 1978 between the Italian and US governments, the Documentation Sector of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità is the national reference centre for the MEDLARS (MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System), a system of biomedical databases and databases produced and/or managed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of Bethesda (USA), of which PubMed is the supporting element.
In this capacity, the Documentation Sector organizes training courses for information professionals, doctors and other staff of the National Health Service, on the characteristics and methods of querying PubMed.
The Documentation Sector is also a national reference center for finding documents not available at Italian libraries through the DOCLINE service of the NLM.
