LibGuides: Health Sciences: Researching Health Topics

Best Databases for Health

PubMed
PubMed contains the MEDLINE database and more.

PubMed provides access to bibliographic information from more than 5,200 journals in the life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.

PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, and provides access to over 14 million citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences.

Coverage: 1950-present
CINAHL Complete
Nursing and allied health. Covers a very broad range of journals.

Provides indexing to nearly 1,200 nursing, allied health, biomedical, and consumer health journals, as well as publications of the American Nurses Association and the National League for Nursing. It includes healthcare books, nursing dissertations, standards of professional practice, nurse practice acts, and educational software. Abstracts are included for over 250 journals.
Google Scholar
Good for finding full text, for "Cited by," and for topic searches. Not usually used for systematic reviews.

Cochrane Library
Especially for Cochrane's systematic reviews, but this also includes CENTRAL, Cochrane's database of randomized and quasi-randomized trials. Use CENTRAL for doing systematic reviews.

There are many other choices: PsycINFO, SportDISCUS, and more.

APPsearch (on main page) contains most of these, so it's advantageous to search them all together there, sometimes.

It's a good practice to start by looking for reviews. Include the word "review" or the phrase "systematic review" with your other search words. PubMed, CINAHL, and PsycINFO allow you to limit results to only systematic reviews.