Popline (Knowledge for Health)

POPLINE® contains the world’s most comprehensive collection of population, family planning and related reproductive health and development literature. An international resource, POPLINE helps program managers, policy makers, and service providers in low- and middle-income countries and in development-supportive agencies and organizations gain access to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished documents.

POPLINE is a free resource, maintained by the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Global Health, Office of Population and Reproductive Health, and is led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP) in partnership with FHI360, IntraHealth International, and Management Sciences for Health (MSH).

Scope and Content

POPLINE includes information on population and family planning, specifically research in contraceptive methods, family planning services, research in human fertility, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS in developing countries, program operations and evaluation, demography, and other related health, law, and policy issues. POPLINE's complete subject scope.

POPLINE consists of bibliographic citations and abstracts to a variety of materials including journal articles and other scientific, technical, and programmatic publications as well as unpublished documents and project reports (gray literature). Most documents published after 2000 contain links to full-text. Many documents are unique to the collection and are unavailable elsewhere.

POPLINE indexes each record using a controlled vocabulary, meaning that there is a specific set of terms used to describe each document. A User's Guide to POPLINE Keywords is the authority list of vocabulary terms used for subject analysis of the documents in POPLINE. Familiarity with this vocabulary will make you a better POPLINE searcher.

Size and Coverage

POPLINE contains 380,000 records. The majority of items are published from 1970 to the present; however, there are selected citations dating back to 1827. The database adds 8,000 records annually. POPLINE consists of bibliographic citations and abstracts to a variety of materials including journal articles and other scientific, technical, and programmatic publications as well as unpublished documents and project reports (gray literature).