# Fetching Medline entries

MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database. It contains references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.

JabRef can download citations from the Medline database. To use this feature, choose Web search -> Fetch Medline, and the Medline interface will appear in the side pane.

There are two ways of specifying which entries to download:

1. Enter one or more Medline IDs (separated by comma/semicolon) in the text field.
2. Enter a set of names and/or words to search for. You can use the operators and and or and parentheses to refine your search expression.

In both cases, press Enter or the Fetch button. If you use a text search, you will be prompted with the number of entries found, and given a choice of how many to download.

The entries fetched will be added to your currently active database.

## Using a Proxy Server

If you need to use an http proxy server, pass the server name and port number to java at runtime.

`java -Dhttp.proxyHost="hostname" -Dhttp.proxyPort="portnumber"`

These environment settings are documented in the Sun J2SE documentation.