Researchers can obtain abstracts to publications in the health sciences through the free-
access PubMed. This database is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, and it
includes over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and life science journals for biomedical
articles going back to the 1950s (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). PubMed includes links to full-text
articles (located in academic libraries) and other related resources. To search PubMed, the
researcher uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms, the U.S. National Library of
Medicine’s controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for
MEDLINE/PubMed. This MeSH terminology provides a consistent way to retrieve
information about topics that may be described using different terms.
On the Internet you can also go to other literature search programs. One typically available
is ProQuest (http://proquest.com), which enables a researcher to search many different
databases, and it is one of the largest online content repositories in the world. Another
would be EBSCO publishing, a for-fee online research service, including full-text databases,
subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives, and e-books.
The company provides more than 350 databases and nearly 300,000 e-books. Also at
academic libraries you can search ERIC, PsycINFO, Dissertation Abstracts, Periodicals
Index, Health and Medical Complete, and many more specialized databases (e.g.,
International Index to Black Periodicals). Because EBSCO taps into many different
databases, it can be one search tool to use before using more specialized databases.
Another commercially licensed database found in many academic libraries is Sociological
Abstracts (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, www.csa.com). This database indexes over
2,000 journals; conference papers; relevant dissertation listings; book reviews; and
selected books in sociology, social work, and related disciplines. For literature in the field of
psychology and related areas, consult another commercial database: PsycINFO
(www.apa.org). This database indexes 2,150 journal titles, books, and dissertations from
many countries. It covers the field of psychology as well as psychological aspects of
physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business, and law. It has a Thesaurus of Psychological
Index Terms to locate useful terms in a literature search.
Psychological Abstracts (American Psychological Association [APA], 1927–) and PsycINFO
(apa.org) represent important sources for locating research articles on topics broadly
related to psychology. The PsycINFO database is available through libraries and may be
accessed through another service, such as EBSCO, Ovid, or ProQuest. PsycINFO indexes
nearly 2,500 journals in 22 major categories and it provides bibliographic citations,
abstracts for psychological journal articles, dissertations, technical reports, books, and
book chapters published worldwide. Similar to an ERIC record, a summary from PsycINFO
includes key phrase identifiers as well as the author, title, source, and a brief abstract of the
article.
Another commercial database available in libraries is the Social Sciences Citation Index
(SSCI) (Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific [http://isiwebofknowledge.com]). It
indexes 1,700 journals spanning 50 disciplines and selectively indexes relevant items from
over 3,300 scientific and technical journals. It can be used to locate articles and authors