LibGuides: Approaching the Literature Review: Approaching the Literature Search

Where should I look for articles on my topic?

To identify potential sources for relevant articles, start with identifying potential stakeholders. Consider who might have an interest in your topic and which disciplines represent them. Depending upon your topic, there could be multiple stakeholder representing a variety of disciplines. For example, the topic of taxing sweetened beverages (i.e., "soda tax") would have multiple stakeholders representing a range of disciplines, including nutrition, public health, economics, legal studies, etc.

Once you identify potential stakeholders,you can then locate the resources that contain the literature for the disciplines that represent them. Be prepared to look beyond biomedical databases for topics that cross into disciplines such as sociology,technology, the environment, economics, and the law. Searching multidisciplinary databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science, makes sense for topics that have multiple stakeholders.

To learn more about identifying potential stakeholders, check out:

Identifying and Analyzing Stakeholders and Their Interests
Work Group for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas.

Searching

Advanced Searching Techniques
Guide to using advances search techniques, such as Boolean operators, wildcards and truncation. Includes tips for searching PubMed, Ovid databases and Web of Science.
How to Use Ovid MEDLINE
Guide provides information about Ovid MEDLINE and instructions for how to find journal articles, manage output and save searches.
PubMed Tutorial
This interactive tutorial created by the National Library of Medicine shows you the features of PubMed and basic search techniques.
Searching using Web of Science
Created by Cornell University Library, this tutorial shows you how "search Web of Science to find scholarly articles, narrow and expand your search results, find highly cited articles and key authors and journals on your topic/field."

Biomedical Databases

CINAHL: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health
Literature in nursing and allied health.
The Cochrane Library
"The Cochrane Library is a collection of databases that contain high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision making. Cochrane Reviews represent the highest level of evidence on which to base clinical treatment decisions."
GlobalHealth
Produced by the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau, this Ovid database provides comprehensive coverage of the international public-health literature, particularly in the areas of tropical medicine, infectious diseases, vector control, food safety, nutrition policy, and epidemiology.

MEDLINE (Ovid)
Search the Medline database, the U.S. National Library of Medicine® (NLM) database of citations and abstracts to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine, through the use of the Ovid interface.
PsycInfo
Covers the scholarly literature in the broad field of psychology. Partner databases include PsycCritiques (book & film reviews in psychology) and PsycBOOKS (full-text chapters from core texts). Can search with ERIC and related databases listed above.
PubMed@Tufts
PubMed contains 25 million citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, healthcare systems, and pre-clinical sciences. This link provides access to the full-text of articles licensed by Tufts via the blue "FindIt@Tufts" icons.

Trials Register of Promoting Health Interventions (TRoPHI)
Database of "trials of interventions in health promotion and public health worldwide. It covers both randomised and non-randomised controlled trials and currently contains details of over 7,750 trials."

Multidisciplinary Databases

CAB Abstracts
Provides current access to international coverage of agriculture, forestry, and allied life and applied sciences. Contains citations to journal articles, books, conference papers, and reports in the fields of agriculture; animal and veterinary sciences; environmental sciences; human health, food and nutrition; leisure and tourism; microbiology and parasitology; and plant sciences.
SCOPUS
Scopus is a large abstract and citation database that includes peer-reviewed titles from international publishers, Open Access journals, conference proceedings, trade publications, and web sources. Subject coverage : Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics and Engineering ; Life and Health Sciences ; Social Sciences, Psychology and Economics ; Biological, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
Web of Science
Search across all Web of Science databases in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Results include indices, journal articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and other resources.