Article Databases
How to Choose a Database
In deciding which database(s) to use, it is helpful to note:
- Who: Who is authoring these publications? Are these scholarly, popular, or industry sources?
- What: What can I find in the database? (e.g. articles, conference proceedings, data)
- When: When does coverage begin? How well is historical literature covered? Does it include articles published in the last year?
- Where: What is the geographical scope of the coverage? Does that match your research interest?
Recommended Subject Databases:
Comprehensive Medical Databases
- PubMed for UC Davis This link opens in a new windowThe go to database for any health sciences research. Probably the best place to start your research.
- CINAHL Complete: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature This link opens in a new windowUseful for areas like nursing, occupational health, public health and other allied health professions which includes medical professionals that are not doctors or nurses.
- Embase This link opens in a new window
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A comprehensive medical database like pubmed with many useful search filters, like pharmacological. Embase has Emtree which is like the Medical Subject Headings in Medline (PubMed). - Global Health This link opens in a new windowA really useful public health resource with a global perspective.
Other Subject Databases of use to Medicine
Anatomy & Physiology
- BIOSIS Previews This link opens in a new windowBIOSIS Previews is a database for researching the biological sciences literature. Designed by biologists for keeping up with the literature across pure and applied life sciences including agriculture and medicine. Excellent features for searching by taxonomic categories and broad concept codes (subject categories). More than 27 million records in all life science areas, including agriculture, biochemistry, biomedicine, biotechnology, ecology, environmental biology, genetics, microbiology, plant biology, veterinary medicine & pharmacology, and zoology. Indexes over 6,000 journals, serials, books and book chapters, conference proceedings and patents.
[Coverage: 1926-present]
Behavioral Medicine
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window
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For anything neurological, pscyhological, behavioral or dealing with perceptions. - Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new windowSociological Abstracts, and its companion file Social Services Abstracts, cover the international literature of sociology, social work, and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. It provides abstracting and indexing of articles and book reviews drawn from thousands of serials publications, plus books, book chapters, dissertations, conference papers, and working papers.
[Coverage: 1952-present]
Biomedical Engineering & Technology
- Compendex This link opens in a new windowCompendex is the broadest and most complete engineering literature database available in the world with over 22 million indexed records from 77 countries across 190 engineering disciplines.
[Coverage: 1884-present] - BIOSIS Previews This link opens in a new windowA large database of basic science but includes applied science like medicine.
Drugs & Pharmacology
- Embase This link opens in a new window
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Embase is a biomedical and pharmacological database containing bibliographic records with citations, abstracts and indexing derived from biomedical articles in peer reviewed journals, and is especially strong in its coverage of drug and pharmaceutical research and conference abstracts.Embase contains over 22 million records spanning 1974-present, with over 1 million records added annually. Each record contains the full bibliographic citation, indexing terms, and codes; and 80% of all citations in Embase include author-written abstracts. The Embase journal collection is international with over 7,500 active peer-reviewed journals more than 90 countries. All MEDLINE records produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) are included, as well as over 5 million records not covered in MEDLINE. Broad biomedical scope covering the following areas:
Drug therapy and research, including pharmaceutics, pharmacology and toxicology
Clinical and experimental (human) medicine
Basic biological science relevant to human medicine
Biotechnology and biomedical engineering, including medical devices
Health policy and management, including pharmacoeconomics
Public, occupational and environmental health, including pollution control
Veterinary science, dentistry, and nursing
Psychiatry and mental health, including substance dependence and abuse
Forensic science
Alternative and complementary medicine
[Coverage: 1974-current (for EMBASE records); 1966-current (for MEDLINE records)]
Environmental Health
- Agricultural & Environmental Science Database This link opens in a new window
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This database covers environmental science topics from disciplines such as atmospheric science, biology, biotechnology, ecology, engineering, and microbiology. It also covers agricultural research including agricultural economics, animal and veterinary sciences, aquaculture and fisheries, farming and farming systems, food and human nutrition, forestry, and plant sciences. It includes Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) and Digests and all the records from the National Agricultural Library's AGRICOLA database.
[Coverage: 1960-present]
Health Economics & Management
- EconLit This link opens in a new windowA comprehensive, indexed bibliography with selected abstracts of the world's economic literature compiled from the American Economic Association's Journal of economic literature and the Index of economic articles in journals and collective volumes. Topics include economic theory and history, monetary theory and financial institutions; labor economics; international, regional, urban economics; and other related subjects.
[Coverage: 1969-present] - Business Source Complete This link opens in a new windowIndexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 are included. In addition to the searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals, Business Source Complete contains detailed author profiles for the 25,000 most-cited authors in the database. Market research reports, industry reports, country reports, company profiles and SWOT analyses are also included.
[Coverage: coverage varies by title with some going as far back as 1886]
Health Ethics
- Philosopher's Index This link opens in a new windowThe Philosopher's Index is a comprehensive, bibliographic database covering worldwide research in all areas of philosophy. It is created by philosophers for philosophers. The Philosopher's Index features: the inclusion of documents from philosophy and interdisciplinary publications, extensive indexing, and author-written abstracts. Philosophers prescreen potential source documents for relevance to the field of philosophy; this enables the inclusion of articles from interdisciplinary journals and contributions from interdisciplinary anthologies that pertain to philosophy. The indexing includes the assignment of subject headings that encompass proper names and subject terms using a standardized thesaurus. The indexing improves the quality of search results and the use of the standardized thesaurus provides consistency across records from the various publications. The abstracts help the user more quickly ascertain the relevance of the documents. The database provides global coverage, with source publications from more than 135 countries, and has records from 1940 to present, with additional records dating back to 1902. It includes more than 530,000 records in 37 languages. Sources includes: journals (print and e-journal articles from more than 1600 philosophy and interdisciplinary journals); books/monographs, including encyclopedias, dictionaries and book series; anthologies; contributions to anthologies from philosophy and interdisciplinary anthologies; and book reviews.
[Coverage: 1940-present]
Health Policy, Regulation & Legislation
- PAIS Index This link opens in a new windowWhenever addressing policy or government issues, this is a useful resource.
- CQ Press Library/Political Reference Suite This link opens in a new windowCongressional Quarterly (CQ) Press provides an integrated search environment for obtaining analysis on Congressional issues in the news and coverage of the status of bills, votes and amendments, floor and committee activity, and backroom maneuvering. This database searches the full-text of CQ Weekly, CQ Researcher, CQ Historic Documents, contact directories, a variety of reference books, and selected datasets focused on issues in U.S. politics and areas of public policy, such as, health care, education, economics, bioethics, environment, and society. Contents are created by more than 125 Capitol Hill reporters, editors, and researchers to provide non-partisan coverage and detailed analysis of issues facing Congress.
- ProQuest Congressional This link opens in a new window
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Provides detailed indexing from 1789 forwards for publications of Congress: documents, reports, hearings. Modules include: Proquest Congressional digital U.S. Congressional hearings collection from 1824-1979; and Digital U.S. Bills and Resolutions from 1789-present. Full text for congressional committee documents and reports is included from 1990 to current. Selected hearing testimony and transcripts are available from 1988. Congressional Research Service Reports module included from 2004-2010. For full text historical serial set (committee documents & reports) from 1817-1980 see U.S. Congressional Serial Set by Readex. Formerly titled LexisNexis Congressional.
[Coverage: dates vary] - HeinOnline This link opens in a new windowFull-text database of US legal periodicals. Includes the following sections: Law Journal Library (Comprised of Most-Cited Law Journals, Core U.S. Law Journals and International & Non-U.S. Law Journals); Federal Register Library (1936-1989); U.S. Supreme Court Library; and Treaties and Agreements Library, the Statutes at Large (1789-), U.S. Code (1924-)
[Coverage: Volume 1- Volume preceding current year]
Nutrition & Food
- CAB Abstracts (Ovid) This link opens in a new window
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The largest veterinary resource with One Health/Global Health resources as well. - Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA) This link opens in a new windowFSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts) is an extensive specialist database covering scientific and technological literature relating to food, beverages and nutrition. Carefully selected food and health research and information is collated, summarized, and indexed for efficient searching. It is managed by a team of expert scientists within IFIS, a not-for-profit organization with an ongoing commitment to learning and development and a reputation for scientific integrity, accuracy and excellence. FSTA covers topics relating to aspects of the food chain including all the major food commodities plus biotechnology, microbiology, food safety, additives, nutrition, packaging and pet foods. It's used by researchers, industry practitioners, and students around the world to keep up-to-date with the latest findings in their fields. FSTA offers in excess of 1,200,000 highly informative summaries of research articles, patents, standards, reviews, conference proceedings and reports, and is used by academics and professionals throughout the world. IMPORTANT: default UCD Search Type is set to Advanced Ovid Search.
[Coverage: 1969-present]
Sports Medicine
- SPORTDiscus This link opens in a new windowAnything on physical fitness and sports medicine from all perspectives of sport science, engineering, medicine, sociology and psychology.
Veterinary Medicine
- CAB Abstracts (Ovid) This link opens in a new window
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Provides citations and abstracts to the international agricultural literature, including veterinary medicine, human and animal nutrition, forestry, rural development, as well as other related topics such as tourism and human ecology. Covers over 11,000 journals and conference proceedings and selected books in agriculture. Produced by CAB (Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux) International (CABI) with more than 10 million records. HISTORICAL SCOPE: Archive abstracts added in August 2005 go back to 1910 with 1,860,000 additional records. CAB DATABASE PDFs: As of January 2009, hard-to-find literature may be available as CAB Database PDFs (so noted below the UC-eLinks button). These CABI Full Text items give users automatic access to over 350,000 journal articles, conference papers and reports 80 percent of which are not available electronically anywhere else. NOTE: the default UCD Search Type is set to Advanced Ovid Search.
[Coverage: 1910-present]
Recommended Interdisciplinary Databases
- Scopus This link opens in a new window
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Multidisciplinary database with citation tracking of particle articles. - Web of Science Core Collection This link opens in a new windowMultidisciplinary database with citation tracking of particle articles.
How to Access the Full Text of an Article
"Get it at UC" Button
Most databases provide a description of articles and other resources to help you find what you need by searching through the indexed literature within their website. Included as part of the item record is the “Get it at UC” button. Clicking this button will direct you to a copy of the full text of the article.
Interlibrary Loan Request
If we do not own a journal or book, you can submit an interlibrary loan (ILL) request to have the book or article (e)mailed to you for free from another UC library. Learn more about how to request books or articles.
Identify Peer-Reviewed Articles
A peer-reviewed source is an article that has been reviewed by several other experts in the field before being published in order to ensure its quality. This 2 minute video describes the peer review process.
How do I Know if an Article is Peer-Reviewed?
Look for limits/filters
Many databases allow you to specify that you want to search only in “peer-reviewed” or “refereed” sources.
Visit the journal’s webpage
Search online for your journal’s title. Sections like “about this journal” or “editorial policies” generally mention whether the journal is peer-reviewed/refereed.
Check a directory
Use the Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory to find key information about a journal, including whether it has a peer-review process.