science

POPLINE

POPLINE is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand POPLINE rather than just read about it. In short: POPLINE (or Population Information Online) was a reproductive health database, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and reproductive health issues. POPLINE was maintained by the K4Health Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs, and it was funded by the U…

Key takeaways

POPLINE belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect POPLINE to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of POPLINE from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

POPLINE (or Population Information Online) was a reproductive health database, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and reproductive health issues. POPLINE was maintained by the K4Health Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs, and it was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

History The original database consisted of citations from Popinform, a database maintained from 1973 to 1978 by the Population Information Program (PIP) at George Washington University. In 1978, the database, along with Population Information Program, moved to the Johns Hopkins University. Between 1980 and 2001, renamed POPLINE, the database became part of the United States National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) along with MEDLINE and other NLM databases. Since 2001, POPLINE had been maintained by the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project, formerly PIP then INFO, based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs. Access to POPLINE was available free of charge at its website. Other organizations contributed to POPLINE throughout its history, such as the Center for Population and Family Health (CPFH) Library/Information Program at Columbia University, Population Index at Princeton University, and the Carolina Population Center (CPC) at the University of North Carolina. On September 1, 2019, POPLINE was officially retired along with the rest of the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project which closed a few days later.

Coverage POPLINE provided more than 370,000 records citing worldwide literature in the area of reproductive health. The majority of items were published from 1970 to the present, but there were selected citations dating back to 1827. The database added 12 thousand records annually and was updated weekly. The database consisted of bibliographic citations and abstracts to a variety of materials including journal articles, monographs, technical reports, and unpublished literature. Subjects covered internationally included family planning methods and programs, fertility, and population law and policy. Additional subjects covered in reference to developing countries include adolescent reproductive health, demography, environmental health, gender and health, health communication, sexually transmitted infections, maternal and child health, population and environment, and women in development.

Services POPLINE had both basic and advanced searches and offered customized searches provided on request to persons or institutions in developing countries. Full-text copies for most of the documents cited in POPLINE could be requested from users in low-income countries free of charge via mail or sent by email. In addition to free text searching, the database could be searched by keywords from the POPLINE Thesaurus, a controlled vocabulary of 2,400+ terms used to index documents in the database.

Controversy In 2008, The New York Times reported that Johns Hopkins University had instructed the POPLINE search engine to ignore the search term "abortion", as it ignores search terms such as "a" and "the", in February 2008 in response to pressure from the United States Agency for International Development. Making the term a stop word removed the ability of users to search for this common term for a reproductive health issue. After learning of the restriction on finding abortion-related articles, the dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Michael J. Klag, lifted the restriction.

References

External links POPLINE.org

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with POPLINE

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what POPLINE claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to POPLINE before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about POPLINE ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of POPLINE

In research: POPLINE appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses POPLINE in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: POPLINE is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2019 disestablishments in the United States, Bibliographic databases and indexes, Birth control, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for POPLINE outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study POPLINE in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what POPLINE means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain POPLINE out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is POPLINE in simple terms?

Why does POPLINE matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study POPLINE?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on POPLINE.