There are many databases for you to choose from, so where do you start?
Below is a list of the most commonly used databases, however, you can get a comprehensive list of databases supported by the University of Birmingham on Findit.
- ASSIA - an indexing and abstracting tool covering health, social services, economics, politics, race relations and education.
- Business Source Premier - a full text business database covering; management, economics, finance, accounting, international business and marketing.
- Cinahl - the authoritative resource for nursing and allied health professionals, students, educators and researchers.
- Embase - a major biomedical and pharmaceutical database indexing over 3,500 international journals in the following fields: drug research, pharmacology, pharmaceutics, toxicology, clinical and experimental human medicine, health policy and management, public health, occupational health, environmental health, drug dependence and abuse, psychiatry, forensic medicine, and biomedical engineering/instrumentation.
- Google Scholar - an online database which allows you to search for scholarly material such as theses, books, articles and abstracts and so forth across various subject disciplines. The"advanced search" option will help you to focus your search further, however, it is worth bearing in mind that searches cover “All fields” and that neither truncation nor Boolean searches are supported.
- HMIC - comprising of the King's Fund and Department of Health databases, HMIC includes bibliographic references of articles, monographs, reports, government documents and grey literature all with a focus on UK health policy and management related information.
- Medline - the main medical database covering the international literature on biomedicine, including the allied health fields and the biological and physical sciences, humanities, and information science as they relate to medicine and health care.
- Scopus - the largest abstract and citation database containing both peer-reviewed research literature and quality web sources. With over 19,000 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers, SciVerse Scopus offers researchers a quick, easy, and comprehensive resource to support their research needs in the scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences fields and, more recently, also in the arts and humanities.
- Social Care Online - a portal to the UK's largest collection of information on social work and social care. You can find everything from research briefings, to reports, government documents, journal articles, events and websites.
- Social Science Citation Index - a multidisciplinary index to the journal literature of the social sciences.
- Social Services Abstracts - a database of current research focused on social work, human services and related areas including social welfare, social policy and community development.
Note:
It is good practice to search a number of different databases in order to get a broad range of results. However, it is not recommended to search multiple databases at the same time, as different databases index different terms differently. For example, the subject heading for information around "doctors" might be "Physicians" in the Medline database, but "General practitioners" in the HMIC database.