Medicine: Databases

Databases are the best way of finding peer-reviewed articles, scholarly books, conferences, theses and other information on your topic. Some databases enable you to search across disciplines while others are tailored to help researchers in your specific subject. 

Have a look at the key databases for medicine:

• Medline (OVID): this is the major clinical database for medicine. If you only search one database, make it this one.
• PubMed is an alternative version of Medline that is freely available
• Embase: covers biomedical research with an emphasis on drug research and pharmacology
• The Cochrane Library: systematic reviews published by the Cochrane Collaboration
• Web of Science: a multidisciplinary database. Good for research questions that cut across different disciplines
• CINAHL: the main nursing allied health database

Alternatively, have a look at the complete list of medical related databases.

For information about other subjects, use our full database list.

If you are searching for published journal literature it is a good idea to search more than one database. The following videos will show you how to run searches in some of your other key databases, which are not on the OVID platform.

Web of Science

The Cochrane Library

CINAHL

Scopus

Clinical databases tend to be a little bit more complicated to search as they usually use an indexing system. The indexing system is there to help you find the most relevant search terms. For example, you may want to search for research on german measles but you would also need to search for rubella. The indexing helps you to find the most relevant keywords. The main indexing system is called MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and is used by Medline and PubMed.

Medline

Medline is a specialist database that indexes most of the world's research articles in the area of medicine.

This tutorial takes you through the process of creating an effective search strategy for the Medline database and gives you an opportunity to have a go at completing a search. It also covers some of the more general search principles and techniques that you can use with any database. The quiz at the end allows you to assess what you have learnt.

The Embase and PsycInfo databases use the same search interface as Medline, so the skills learnt in the tutorial can be applied to these databases as well.

Conducting a systematic literature search.

For anyone undertaking a systematic review, a scoping review or any review that requires evidence of how you have searched the research literature, this tutorial will help you to think about the practical steps of completing the searching stage of your systematic review. This includes advanced search techniques, the use of search filters, supplementary search techniques, including citation searching. There is also advice on recording your search strategies and managing your references.

Evidence Based Medicine.

You may already be familiar with searching the literature using databases such as Medline, but there are a range of other information resources that can help you to evaluate and critically appraise the quality of the research that you are finding.

This tutorial will introduce you to the process of conducting an evidence based literature search and give you an overview of the range of specialist evidence based information resources available. You will have the opportunity to investigate the different resources.

Advanced search techniques.

There are a range of search techniques that you can use to help to refine your search strategies, such as truncation, wildcards, phrase searching and proximity searching. Some of these techniques apply across all databases, for example, truncation searching and others will vary between the different databases, for example, proximity searching. The following guide will show you how to apply these techniques in the following databases – Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, CINAHL, Web of Science, ASSIA, Scopus and the Cochrane Library.

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