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| 1) Major Public Databases |
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| The National Library of Medicine (NLM) databases now include
more than 10 million citations. Although there are numerous commercial
vendors providing access to these databases, they are available for free
via Grateful Med, and PubMed. A good
description
of the NLM databases, which include Medline, Healthstar and several specialized
databases, is available through Grateful Med.
Many institutions (including our own) use OVID, and there are other commercial vendors. Through OVID, you can also search multiple databases including Medline, EMBASE, HealthStar, Best Evidence, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Furthermore, full text articles are available for many major journals. EMBASE is the British equivalent of the NLM database. Medline and EMBASE overlap by approximately 35%, however, both include most of the common, high quality, medical journals. If you are doing a systematic review, or if you don't find what you want in Medline, try EBMBASE. HealthStar is a valuable database which is often overlooked by clinicians. It covers many clinical journals and particularly focuses on health care process and outcomes information. If you do not have access to a private vendor, such as OVID, the choice of Public access format (Grateful Med or PubMed) is largely a matter of preference. The current version of Gratful Med is easy to use and quite versatile. PubMed also offers automatically filtered searches for diagnosis, therapy, prognosis, and etiology from the "clinical query" search format. Note that "sensitivity" and "specificity" on the pubmed clinical query page refer a focused versus unfocused search, not to the statistical terms. However, PubMed only includes Medline and PreMedline for clinical citations.
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| CLICK HERE FOR THE NEXT SECTION:
MeSH Vocabulary: organization of the database: (NLM document) FOLLOW THE COURSE OUTLINE:
Ovid Online Search Manual |