The National Library of Medicine (NLM) uses an NIH-chartered committee, the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC), to review and recommend biomedical and health-related life science journals for inclusion in MEDLINE. Journals must first be suitable for the NLM collection and have subject material appropriate for MEDLINE before they can be considered for review by LSTRC. Also, journals are not eligible for MEDLINE if they were recently reviewed for PMC and did not meet the PMC's scientific quality standard. The NLM web page "Journal Selection for MEDLINE" describes the role of the LSTRC and several critical elements that serve as a general guide for recommending journals to be indexed in MEDLINE.

A publisher or editor must submit an application for a journal to be considered for inclusion in MEDLINE. If a journal is selected for MEDLINE, its article citations will be reviewed and processed. Metadata, including Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), are added to the citations. MEDLINE content is presented through the PubMed database and also distributed through the NLM Data Distribution program as it has been for decades. Publishers and editors of journals selected for MEDLINE must understand that their journal citations will be part of the distribution program.

The NLM Web page called Information for Publishers gathers links for many sources of information relevant to publishers’ needs. For questions about MEDLINE and PubMed, see the Fact Sheet "MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC (PubMed Central): How are they different?"