Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Jul 19;27(10):1606-1611.
doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocaa084. Online ahead of print.

UMLS users and uses: a current overview

Affiliations

UMLS users and uses: a current overview

Liz Amos et al. J Am Med Inform Assoc. .

Abstract

The US National Library of Medicine regularly collects summary data on direct use of Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) resources. The summary data sources include UMLS user registration data, required annual reports submitted by registered users, and statistics on downloads and application programming interface calls. In 2019, the National Library of Medicine analyzed the summary data on 2018 UMLS use. The library also conducted a scoping review of the literature to provide additional intelligence about the research uses of UMLS as input to a planned 2020 review of UMLS production methods and priorities. 5043 direct users of UMLS data and tools downloaded 4402 copies of the UMLS resources and issued 66 130 951 UMLS application programming interface requests in 2018. The annual reports and the scoping review results agree that the primary UMLS uses are to process and interpret text and facilitate mapping or linking between terminologies. These uses align with the original stated purpose of the UMLS.

Keywords: National Library of Medicine (US); Unified Medical Language System; scoping review; surveys and questionnaires; terminology (as topic).

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Counts of articles using various UMLS products.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Counts of articles using different types of corpora.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Counts of articles for different usages of UMLS.

References

    1. Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/index.htmlAccessed February 7, 2020
    1. Lindberg DA, Humphreys BL, McCray AT. The Unified Medical Language System. Methods Inf Med 1993; 32 (04): 281–91. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Humphreys BL, Lindberg DA, Schoolman HM, et al. The Unified Medical Language System: an informatics research collaboration. J Am Med Inform Assoc 1998; 5 (1): 1–11. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Humphreys BL, Lindberg DA. The UMLS project: making the conceptual connection between users and the information they need. Bull Med Libr Assoc 1993; 81 (2): 170–7. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bodenreider O. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS): integrating biomedical terminology. Nucleic Acids Res 2004; 32 (Database issue): D267–70. - PMC - PubMed