Information Resources for Clinical Research, 3 of 5

>> Tracy Shields: Hi, I'm Tracy Shields, a biomedical librarian at the NIH Library. In this section of Searching the Literature, we're going to talk about where to search the databases and more that you need to consider. But before we get into that, you need to understand what you search when you search, understand the difference

between the platform and a database, and what resources are options for your literature searches, along with some things outside of the normal peer reviewed literature that you may want to consider. So what you search when you do a search is maybe not what you think it is. Generally speaking, you're not searching full text.

In most databases, you're searching a limited set of information based on what's in the database record itself. The database could be a curated collection, so you could be restricted to a specific subject area, who's published it, when it was published, who's providing the database. All of those things may be a factor in what you're searching when you search a database.

And what resource you select may depend on your subject area. So let's talk a little bit about platforms and databases. You may be familiar with a database called Medline. It is a bibliographic database that has more than 30 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration in biomedicine. It is produced

by the U.S. National Library of Medicine or NLM, but is available for multiple providers. You may be more familiar with it as something called PubMed, which is freely available to anyone. But Medline is also available through paid access or subscription resources such as Ovid, EBSCO Host, and other platforms. You can actually do a search of Medline