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Search databases to get information you need. How you search and which database you choose depends on your needs.
Find databases from the Databases tab on the homepage.
Here is a list of popular databases with descriptions of their strengths, when to use them, and how to effectively use them:
PubMed
| Why start with it? | - A robust source for biomedical information and the “go to” sources for clinicians and researchers in biomedicine.
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| Tips for answering a quick question | - Use pre-formulated clinical and other queries to improve the specificity of your search.
- Use “related articles” to find additional articles.
- Sort by “best match” to bring most relevant articles to top of results.
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| Tips for the expert searcher | - Includes a controlled vocabulary, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
- Can use phrase searching and end of word truncation.
- Can create free account to save searches an set up alerts to new articles on search topic.
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Cochrane Library
| Why start with it? | - Covers clinical areas very well, but also includes public health and international trials and reviews.
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| Tips for answering a quick question | - Quickly identify controlled trials or systematic reviews.
- Use search box on the top right of the main page for simple searches. Systematic reviews, trials and other types of articles are in separate sets accessible from the left of the results page.
- Sort by “relevance” to bring most relevant articles to top of results.
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| Tips for the expert searcher | - Includes a controlled vocabulary, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).
- Can use phrase searching, end of word truncation, within word wildcards, and proximity operators.
- Can create free account to save searches an set up alerts to new articles on search topic.
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CINAHL Plus
| Why start with it? | - Covers questions about nursing and allied health procedures.
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| Tips for answering a quick question | - Use search boxes to quickly search the title, abstract and keywords of records.
- Use facets on the left of the results page to limit results by year, type of material and other types of articles are in separate sets accessible from the left of the results page.
- Sort by “relevance” to bring most relevant articles to top of results.
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| Tips for the expert searcher | - Includes a controlled vocabulary, CINAHL Headings.
- Can use phrase searching, end of word truncation, within word wildcards, and proximity operators.
- Can create free account to save searches an set up alerts to new articles on search topic.
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Scopus
| Why start with it? | - Covers questions that include social and behavioral aspects or are intrinsically interdisciplinary.
- Tracks who cited articles.
- Tracks “H index” and other researcher publishing metrics.
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| Tips for answering a quick question | - Use search boxes to quickly search the title, abstract and keywords of records.
- Use facets on the left of the results page to limit results by year, author, subjects and more.
- Sort by “relevance” to bring most relevant articles to top of results. Can also sort by number of citations to the articles (most cited by other authors.)
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| Tips for the expert searcher | - Does NOT have a controlled vocabulary.
- Strong author disambiguation if searching for publications by particular authors.
- Can use phrase searching, end of word truncation, within word wildcards, and proximity operators.
- Can create free account to save searches an set up alerts to new articles on search topic.
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OMIM
| Why start with it? | - Covers genes, genetic disorders.
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| Tips for answering a quick question | - View results as a table organized by chromosomal position from the results page by selecting on the "Gene Map Table" button.
- View results that have clinical synopses by selecting the "Clinical Synopsis" button.
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| Tips for the expert searcher | - Search clinical synopses for specific clinical features. Search the gene map using genomic coordinates or chromosome numbers.
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Gene
| Why start with it? | - Covers gene-specific content based on NCBI's RefSeq project, information from model organism databases, and links to other resources (e.g. expression data, biological pathways, variants, etc.).
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| Tips for answering a quick question | - Within a Gene record, use the table of contents to navigate quickly to features of interest (e.g. NCBI Reference Sequences.)
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| Tips for the expert searcher | - Use the Advanced Search to search specific fields (e.g. gene name, organism, gene ontology, etc.) and build complex queries.
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