Guides @ UF: Library Resources for New HSC Faculty: Searching Literature for Your Research

Searching the Biomedical Literature

Listed below are a few databases that might be useful when beginning your information search. For a more complete list, please see our page of HSC Library Databases.

Searching the Literature for Research

PubMed
Biomedical database from U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed comprises citations from MEDLINE, life science journals, and e-books, some links to full text content.
Embase
Embase is a biomedical and pharmacological bibliographic database, offering up-to-date citations and abstracts from a wide spread of biomedical and drug literature. The PICO search builder tool is great for creating a quick, comprehensive search. It's particularly useful for drug, disease, and material device data.
Web of Science
The Web of Science® includes citations in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. In addition, this database includes conference proceedings and offers easy citation tracking.

Evidence-Based Practice

UpToDate
UpToDate is an evidence-based, physician-authored clinical decision support resource which clinicians consult when making point-of-care decisions. An editorial team condenses the most recent medical information into evidence-based recommendations to improve patient care and quality.

Courtesy of the College of Medicine Office of Graduate Medical Education
MICROMEDEX Healthcare Series
MICROMEDEX is an excellent source of drug indication, dosage, drug interaction and side effect information, as well as poison control information. It covers all FDA approved medications as well as a database of alternative medicines.
AccessMedicine
This is a great tool for students and learners. AccessMedicine offers instant access to videos, self-assessment, an image library and leading medical textbooks that facilitate decision-making at the point-of-care to ensure the best patient outcome.

Systematic Review Assistance

Your liaison librarian can help answer questions about systematic review searches and other resources available at UF. More information is also available in our Systematic Review Guide.

Covidence
Users must sign up with UF email account. Covidence is a web-based software platform that streamlines the production of systematic reviews, including Cochrane Reviews. The key steps in systematic reviews supported by Covidence are Citation screening, Full text review, Risk of Bias assessment, Extraction of study characteristics and outcomes, and Export of data and references into citation management programs.

Key Databases

Studies have shown that systematic reviews should include at least MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science for a comprehensive review of the literature (Bramer 2017). Searching multiple databases for a systematic review addresses database bias.

Certain journals may also have expectations for included databases, so always consult with the author guidelines for your preferred journal before performing your search.

MEDLINE (PubMed)
Biomedical database from U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed comprises citations from MEDLINE, life science journals, and e-books, some links to full text content.
Embase
Covers medical literature from 1947 - present. It has 45.6 million records, an average of 8,535 new entries daily and over 12 million records not in MEDLINE.
Web of Science
Multidisciplinary journal indexing and citation database with coverage back to 1900.
Cochrane Library
The Cochrane Library contains high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making
Scopus
Comprehensive, curated abstract and citation database with enriched data and linked scholarly literature across a wide variety of disciplines.

Contacting Your Liaison Librarian

Do you need help?

Liaisons are subject specialist librarians dedicated to specific academic units, including colleges, departments, centers/institutes, and academic programs.

Feel free to contact your Liaison Librarian with any information-related questions, or just to see what we can do for you and your research, teaching, clinical or administrative programs.

Find your HSC Library Liaison

If you are on the Jacksonville campus, please visit our Borland Library liaisons.