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Research Databases

Produced by the Web of Science Group,  BIOSIS Previews ®  an expansive index to life sciences and biomedical research from journals, meetings, books, and patents. The database covers pre-clinical and experimental research, methods and instrumentation, animal studies, and more. Includes BIOSIS indexing and enhanced MeSH disease terms.

This collection is an essential source of high-quality health care data, not only useful for providers and patients, but also for those responsible for researching, teaching, funding and administrating at all levels of the medical profession.

Dentistry & Oral Sciences Source is the definitive full-text research database for dental practitioners and researchers. It offers top dental and oral sciences journals commonly purchased by dental schools and related institutions.

Food Science Source is an extensive full-text database designed to support the research needs of the food industry. It provides hundreds of full-text journals, monographs, magazines and trade publications, plus a wealth of food industry and market reports. Subjects include food processing, safety, service, shipping and innovation. 

GIDEON (Global Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Network) provides a current, evidence-based resource for diagnosis, treatment and teaching in the fields of tropical and infectious diseases, epidemiology and microbiology.

Produced by CABI, this database was created to ensure that key literature from all sources can be brought to the attention of those working in public health. The database covers all aspects of public health at both international and community levels, as well as a wealth of material from other biomedical and life science fields.

Produced by the Web of Science Group, this comprehensive database provides indexing and abstracts for pharmaceutical and medical journals published worldwide. It is essential to anyone interested in keeping abreast of today's health-related drug literature.

Physicians around the world use Isabel to help construct or broaden a differential diagnosis. By entering the information normally captured in a patient workup, Isabel provides physicians with a list of possible diagnoses to help them construct their thinking and make an accurate final diagnosis quickly and easily at the point of care.

MEDLINE with Full Text is a robust database providing full text for hundreds of top biomedical and health journals indexed in MEDLINE. Many journals are available with no embargo, so doctors, nurses, health professionals and researchers can access information as soon as it is published.

This database is the world's largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. Produced by the American Psychological Association, it is an indispensable tool for the discovery of global scholarly research.

Created for sports medicine and physical therapy students and researchers, Rehabilitation & Sports Medicine Source offers full-text sports medicine and rehabilitation journals, trade publications and magazines.

Ideal for students and teachers of anatomy, physiology, biology and other life sciences, Scientific & Medical ART Imagebase (SMART Imagebase) contains downloadable medical illustrations, animations and interactive multimedia.

SPORTDiscus with Full text is the definitive database for sports and sports medicine research. Providing hundreds of full-text sports medicine journals, it is an essential tool for health professionals and researchers studying fitness, health and sports. 

Produced by ViDALGroup, ViDAL Consult improves patients’ safety by offering the most complete access to Spanish-language drug information related to reference clinical content within a single interface.

MEDLINE Complete is a leading full-text database of biomedical and health journals, providing full text for thousands of top medical journals with cover-to-cover indexing. It is an essential research tool for doctors, nurses, health professionals and researchers.

With CINAHL Complete, users get fast and easy full-text access to top nursing journals, evidence-based care sheets, quick lessons and more. Take a few minutes to evaluate all that CINAHL Complete has to offer and you’ll see why hundreds of thousands of nurses and allied health professionals rely on this essential resource.

eBook Collections

Simplify the research process for nursing staff and students with this curated e-book collection designed for use in hospitals, medical institutions and academic institutions. From clinical guides and evidence-based practice manuals, to practical handbooks and professional growth titles, this collection provides researchers the information they need to provide outstanding care.

Offer clinicians and students unlimited, anytime access to essential medical e-books. This subscription collection features thousands of hand-selected e-books designed for use in clinical settings, biomedical libraries and academic-medical institutions.

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Reference management. Clean and simple.

The top list of research databases for medicine and healthcare

3. Cochrane Library

4. pubmed central (pmc), 5. uptodate, frequently asked questions about research databases for medicine and healthcare, related articles.

Web of Science and Scopus are interdisciplinary research databases and have a broad scope. For biomedical research, medicine, and healthcare there are a couple of outstanding academic databases that provide true value in your daily research.

Scholarly databases can help you find scientific articles, research papers , conference proceedings, reviews and much more. We have compiled a list of the top 5 research databases with a special focus on healthcare and medicine.

PubMed is the number one source for medical and healthcare research. It is hosted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and provides bibliographic information including abstracts and links to the full text publisher websites for more than 28 million articles.

• Coverage: around 35 million items
• Abstracts: ✔
• Related articles: ✔
• References: ✘
• Cited by: ✘
• Links to full text: ✔
• Export formats: XML, NBIB

Pro tip: Use a reference manager like Paperpile to keep track of all your sources. Paperpile integrates with PubMed and many popular databases. You can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons and later cite them in thousands of citation styles:

EMBASE (Excerpta Medica Database) is a proprietary research database that also includes PubMed. It can also be accessed by other database providers such as Ovid .

• Coverage: 38 million articles
• References: ✔
• Cited by: ✔
• Full text: ✔ (requires institutional subscription to EMBASE and individual publishers)
• Export formats: RIS

The Cochrane Library is best know for its systematic reviews. There are 53 review groups around the world that ensure that the published reviews are of high-quality and evidence based. Articles are updated over time to reflect new research.

• Coverage: several thousand high quality reviews
• Full text: ✔
• Export formats: RIS, BibTeX

PubMed Central is the free, open access branch of PubMed. It includes full-text versions for all indexed papers. You might also want to check out its sister site Europe PMC .

• Coverage: more than 8 million articles
• Export formats: APA, MLA, AMA, RIS, NBIB

Like the Cochrane Library, UpToDate provides detailed reviews for clinical topics. Reviews are constantly updated to provide an up-to-date view.

• Coverage: several thousand articles from over 420 peer-reviewed journals
• Related articles: ✘
• Full text: ✔ (requires institutional subscription)
• Export formats: ✘

PubMed is the number one source for medical and healthcare research. It is hosted at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and provides bibliographic information including abstracts and links to the full text publisher websites for more than 35 million items.

EMBASE (Excerpta Medica Database) is a proprietary research database that also includes in its corpus PubMed. It can also be accessed by other database providers such as Ovid.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

PubMed Overview

PubMed is a free resource supporting the search and retrieval of biomedical and life sciences literature with the aim of improving health–both globally and personally.

The PubMed database contains more than 37 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It does not include full text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website or PubMed Central (PMC) .

Available to the public online since 1996, PubMed was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) , at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) , located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) .

About the Content

Citations in PubMed primarily stem from the biomedicine and health fields, and related disciplines such as life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering.

PubMed facilitates searching across several NLM literature resources:

MEDLINE is the largest component of PubMed and consists primarily of citations from journals selected for MEDLINE; articles indexed with MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and curated with funding, genetic, chemical and other metadata.

PubMed Central (PMC)

Citations for PubMed Central (PMC) articles make up the second largest component of PubMed.

PMC is a full text archive that includes articles from journals reviewed and selected by NLM for archiving (current and historical), as well as individual articles collected for archiving in compliance with funder policies.

The final component of PubMed is citations for books and some individual chapters available on Bookshelf .

Bookshelf is a full text archive of books, reports, databases, and other documents related to biomedical, health, and life sciences.

Additional Resources

• For how-to information on searching the PubMed database, see the PubMed User Guide.
• For additional PubMed documentation, visit NLM's MEDLINE and PubMed resources guide .

Last update: August 15, 2023

NCBI Literature Resources

MeSH PMC Bookshelf Disclaimer

The PubMed wordmark and PubMed logo are registered trademarks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Unauthorized use of these marks is strictly prohibited.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

PubMed Central (PMC) Home Page

PubMed Central ® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM)

Discover a digital archive of scholarly articles, spanning centuries of scientific research.

Learn how to find and read articles of interest to you.

Collections

Browse the PMC Journal List or learn about some of PMC's unique collections.

For Authors

Navigate the PMC submission methods to comply with a funder mandate, expand access, and ensure preservation.

For Publishers

Learn about deposit options for journals and publishers and the PMC selection process.

For Developers

Find tools for bulk download, text mining, and other machine analysis.

10.2 MILLION articles are archived in PMC.

Content provided in part by:, full participation journals.

Journals deposit the complete contents of each issue or volume.

NIH Portfolio Journals

Journals deposit all NIH-funded articles as defined by the NIH Public Access Policy.

Selective Deposit Programs

Publisher deposits a subset of articles from a collection of journals.

March 21, 2024

Preview upcoming improvements to pmc.

We are pleased to announce the availability of a preview of improvements planned for the PMC website. These…

Dec. 15, 2023

Update on pubreader format.

The PubReader format was added to PMC in 2012 to make it easier to read full text articles on tablet, mobile, and oth…

We are pleased to announce the availability of a preview of improvements planned for the PMC website. These improvements will become the default in October 2024.

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

MEDLINE Overview

MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains more than 31 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.

MEDLINE is a primary component of PubMed , a literature database developed and maintained by the NLM National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). MEDLINE is the online counterpart to the MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) that originated in 1964 (see MEDLINE history ). A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).

Selection process:  The current procedure for adding new journals to MEDLINE is described on the page How to Include a Journal in MEDLINE . Time coverage:  MEDLINE includes literature published from 1966 to present, and selected coverage of literature prior to that period. For details about pre-1966 citations see OLDMEDLINE Data .

Source:  Currently, citations from more than 5,200 worldwide journals in about 40 languages.

Updates:  Citations are added to PubMed 7 days a week.

Subject coverage:  In line with the Collection and Preservation Policy of the NLM , the subject scope of MEDLINE is biomedicine and health, broadly defined to encompass those areas of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering needed by health professionals and others engaged in basic research and clinical care, public health, health policy development, or related educational activities. MEDLINE also covers life sciences vital to biomedical practitioners, researchers, and educators, including aspects of biology, environmental science, marine biology, plant and animal science as well as biophysics and chemistry.

The majority of the publications in MEDLINE are scholarly journals; however, a small number of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters considered useful to particular segments of the NLM broad user community have historically been included.

Availability: Searching MEDLINE via PubMed results in a list of citations (including authors, title, source, and often an abstract) to journal articles and links to the electronic full-text, if available. Searching PubMed is free of charge and does not require registration.

A growing number of MEDLINE citations in PubMed contain a link to the free full-text of the article archived in PubMed Central . Some MEDLINE citations also have publisher-provided links to the full-text of the article at the journal website; exact details depend on the publisher's access requirements.

PubMed data, including MEDLINE, can be downloaded as described on the Download PubMed Data page.

Last Reviewed: February 5, 2024