Medicine/Health Databases

PubMed via NLM
Description:  PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, provides access to over 12 million MEDLINE citations back to the mid-1960's and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources.

NCWC Librarians Say:  PubMed is the largest and most extensive database of medical citations, but does not contain a huge amount of full text of its own.  Use the Find Journals by Title portion of the NCWC library homepage to check for full text.

CINAHL via EBSCOhost
Description:  CINAHL is the most complete and best-known database covering nursing, biomedicine, health sciences librarianship, consumer health, and allied health fields.

NCWC Librarians Say:  If you're working on a topic at the intersection of social science and health, such as epidemiology or the provision of medical care, CINAHL is essential.

MEDLINEplus via NLM
Description: MEDLINEplus has extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on over 600 diseases and conditions.  It also includes a News section, a medical encyclopedia, and information about medications.

NCWC Librarians Say:  A very helpful reference site for any of the topics in the above description.  Use this as a better alternative to WebMD and Googling your symptoms; this is scientific and refereed information.  MEDLINE even contains journal articles, but these must be found by first looking up the condition or topic and using the menus.

Health Source: Consumer Edition via EBSCOhost
Description:  Provides consumer oriented information on many health topics including the medical sciences, food sciences and nutrition, childcare, sports medicine, and general health.

NCWC Librarians Say:  The Consumer Edition, as opposed to the Nursing/Academic edition, is much more focused on articles that are relevant to consumers or basic members of the population.  Good for quickly familiarizing yourself with certain issues.

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition via EBSCOhost
Description:  Provides more than 400 scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines, and provides abstracts and indexing for over 500 journals.

NCWC Librarians Say:  Use this for finding scholarly resources in the medical fields, especially when compared with the Consumer Edition.  Combined with CINAHL, these represent the best full-text article databases for health topics.

TOXNET via NLM
Description:  An integrated system of toxicology and environmental health databases organized by the National Library of Medicine.

NCWC Librarians Say:  Anything related to environmental hazards, biohazards, and other issues related to toxins can be searched from here.  These databases tend to contain technical information and specifications over analysis.

Wiley InterScience via North Carolina Consortium
Description:  The InterScience database contains full text for over 2,500 academic journals, books, and reference works.  Disciplines covered well include business, chemistry, computer science, education, life sciences, and social sciences.

NCWC Librarians Say:  Almost all of the content on Wiley is unique to Wiley, and much of it is very useful.  The fact that books are lined up alongside journal articles makes Wiley quite helpful, particularly for science-related topics.

Other Medicine/Health information may be found in the General/Multidisciplinary article databases