SPPS 220: Drug Information: Secondary Databases

Covers over 6,000 journals in the biological sciences as well as selected patents and conference abstracts and coverage is back to 1926. Offers searching by keyword as well as biosystematic names. Use the "Cited Reference Search" tab on top of screen to search for lists of articles citing your reference. This is the online version of Biological Abstracts. It has a lot of useful information on plant biology related herbal drugs and early animal testing of drugs. It uses multiple controlled vocabularies, all of which are somewhat daunting, but which can be useful for doing comprehensive searches. Articles can also be located using text word searches, similar to Web of Science. It indexes special journal issues that are not covered in PubMed.

Embase covers over 8,500 journals from 90 countries, including over 2,900 journals that are unique to Embase (i.e., coverage that does not overlap with PubMed). Subjects covered include all disciplines of medicine and biomedical science, with particular strengths in the fields of drug research, pharmacology and toxicology. It also includes substantial coverage of Allied Health subjects and is a key resource for systematic reviews, particularly ones involving drug therapy. Conference abstracts are included starting in 2009. Database coverage includes 1974 to present.

Search for scholarly publications across disciplines & sources: articles, theses/dissertations, books, and more, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities etc. Use Scholar Preferences option for UC-eLinks.

This is the most important bibliographic medical database. It is free from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, courtesy of your tax dollars. Covers over 5,500 journals in the biomedical and health sciences, and years included are generally 1946 - present. Articles are indexed using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), an extensive controlled vocabulary. Learning to navigate and search this database using MeSH and its other features will be extremely useful for your career in school, as well as in pharmacy.

Covers over 6,000 journals in all subjects. Includes the unique "cited reference search" to identify papers which have cited a previously published work or author. Coverage goes back to 1900. This database is far broader than medicine alone, covering all of science, including the social sciences. Its unique attributes include indexing of some medical journals not covered in PubMed, indexing of special journal issues that contain abstracts of presentations at professional meetings, and tracking of references in articles. This latter feature allows one to find articles after a publication that cited it, in effect following a literature trail into the future from the original publication. Web of Science has no controlled vocabulary, so doing a comprehensive search on a topic often involves “ORing” several similar terms together in a text word (free text) search of titles and abstracts.