BioethicsLine

When the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University was founded in 1971, one of its first projects was to create a unique bioethics library. At that time information was “siloed” by discipline, so the goal was to create an international interdisciplinary collection to support research on bioethical issues.

You can access the BIOETHICSLINE database collection by clicking here.

From 1975 to 2000, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) supported this endeavor by providing funding to collect government reports, unpublished documents, legal materials, audiovisuals, books and journals as part of the production of NLM’s database BIOETHICSLINE. The Bioethics Information Retrieval Project was created through this funding and many of the materials are maintained to this day by Bioethics Research Library.

This collection contains over 50,000 bibliographic citations for resources that cover literature on a wide range of bioethical issues. The citation database is currently housed in a Digital Georgetown collection and provides OpenURL and Digital Object Identifier (DOI) links to quickly search for publisher full-text access through your local research institution. Citations in this collection are assigned subject keywords following the Bioethics Thesaurus. You may use the subject keywords to search for specific citations using either the advanced search or by clicking on the subject facet located on the right side of the Digital Georgetown collection.

If you are interested in learning more about the history of BIOETHICSLINE there are several pieces of ephemera housed in our Historical Ephemera of the Bioethics Research Library digital collection that may want to take note of.