Index Medicus -national Library Of Medicine- Abbreviations For Journal Titles -

The breaking point came in the winter of 1959. A visiting professor from Heidelberg politely complained that the latest Index Medicus weighed four more pounds than the previous year’s edition. “It is not the knowledge that is heavy,” he said, “but the ink wasted on ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Section on Experimental Pathology and Therapeutics.’”

The NLM knew they had a tiger by the tail. In 1963, with the advent of computerized indexing (the precursor to MEDLINE), they formalized the system into what became known as the . Every abbreviation had to be unique, reversible (you could reconstruct the original title from the abbreviation, mostly), and language-agnostic. English, French, German—all were flattened into a common, Roman-alphabet code. The breaking point came in the winter of 1959

If you are writing for medicine, use the NLM list. In 1963, with the advent of computerized indexing

Shortening common words (e.g., "Journal" becomes "J," "Medical" becomes "Med," and "Research" becomes "Res"). Maintaining the word order of the original title. If you are writing for medicine, use the NLM list

While the printed Index Medicus ceased publication in 2004, its standards live on through MEDLINE and PubMed. Today, the NLM Catalog is the primary tool for finding the official abbreviation of any journal indexed in these databases. If you are writing a paper for a medical journal, you are likely required to use these specific NLM formats for your reference list. How to Find Official Abbreviations

: Standard NLM style omits periods after abbreviated words (e.g., J Am Coll Cardiol instead of J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. ).

I can provide the exact for any title you have.