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Advanced Literature Searching For Health

1.2 Selecting databases

What database should I choose?

Every search begins with a research question or topic. The next step is to choose where to search, and in this case, what specific databases to search. This is as simple as looking up what each database covers, and selecting ones that match your question/topic. Let's use this example as a research question.

A patient with gestational diabetes (GDM) has been recommended glucose-lowering drugs, but wants to know if diet supplements could be just as effective.

Where should we search?

The library has a large list of health databases. It's a good idea to acquaint yourself with their names and what they cover. You can view the list and descriptions through the Health Databases link below.

Common health databases

Let's take the research question and see if it's a good fit for these common databases.

  • Medline: Large medicine and health database, with extensive US coverage.  
  • Embase: Large medicine database with focus on drugs, medical devices and health topics. Covers a number of European journals.  Medline and Embase are often used together to get lots of coverage. 
  • CINAHL: Large nursing and allied health database. Strong in qualitative research.
  • PsycINFO: A psychology database which covers psychology, psychiatry and counselling journals. 
  • Cochrane Library: Source of high-quality information to answer clinical questions.
  • ProQuest Health and Medicine: A large database with a wide multidisciplinary coverage.

 

In our example, we would choose to search Medline, Embase, Cochrane Library and CINAHL as they are the databases most likely to contain evidence on our topic.