Conducting an Efficient Literature Search: Other useful databases

• Other databases
• Web of Science
• Scopus
• Ovid databases
• Topic-specific databases

The Wood Library subscribes to many subscription databases beyond what is covered in class. Some are available from the Library homepage under Popular e-Resources (e.g. the Cochrane Library); others can be found by searching the E-Resources tab of the search bar on the homepage. You can search either by subject keywords (e.g. psychiatry, social work) or by database name (e.g. PsycINFO). Email us for help choosing additional databases, help with a search, questions about how to use a database, or to request one-on-one consultation or training. 

Like Google Scholar, Web of Science is a good supplement to searching PubMed when you have an interdisciplinary topic such as health equity, or when you want to retrieve meeting abstracts for studies that may not have been published as journal articles. It also offers citation searching which helps you find additional relevant literature.

Also available from the Wood Library homepage under Popular e-Resources

Like Web of Science, Scopus also offers citation searching functionality. Its coverage is primarily focused on the sciences. 

The Ovid platform offers an alternative to PubMed for searching MEDLINE, as well as access to Embase, which has more coverage of international journals, strong coverage of drug/pharmaceutical research, and includes preprints. 

Ovid has a steeper learning curve, but has very useful features that are unavailable in PubMed such as adjacency searching and better phrase search. E-mail your librarian for help getting started with Ovid searching.