Common Student Questions, Answered
How do I even begin to start searching?
Where are places I can search for evidence or literature at Yale?
- Articles+ from Yale QuickSearchIn Articles+, you can search most of Yale's licensed content. Your results might include e-books and articles from newspapers and encyclopedias, as well as journal articles. The other databases on this list will let you create more precise searches, but Articles+ can be an easy way to explore a new topic.
- Embase (Ovid)Like PubMed, Embase has millions of citations from biomedical journals, complete with subject indexing. Unlike PubMed, Embase also includes conference abstracts. Embase is especially good for pharmacology because its controlled vocabulary, Emtree, covers drug and chemical terms extensively. If you're doing a comprehensive search, you need to search PubMed/MEDLINE and Embase (at least).
- Global HealthGlobal Health is our specialist database for public health. It's small, around three million records. So why search it? Because more than 40% its citations (for journal articles, reports, books, theses, and conference proceedings) are unique and not available from other databases. It covers chronic diseases, environmental and occupational health, epidemiology and biostatistics, and health systems -- not just global health.
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar has lots of material, and it's not limited (as many databases are) to searching title/abstract instead of full text. If the Google Scholar relevance ranking algorithm is helping you find what you need, excellent! Still, it has some limitations: it's hard to refine your queries, you can't use Boolean operators, you can't download batches of citations. So, for any comprehensive literature search, you'll want to use other resources. But sometimes you don't need a comprehensive search; for those times, you can set up your Google Scholar settings to include YaleLinks so that you can get full-text easily.
- MEDLINE (Ovid)Compiled by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), MEDLINE is the world's most comprehensive source of life sciences and biomedical bibliographic information. It contains records from different publications from 1965 to the present. Subjects covered include all aspects of clinical medicine (diseases and disorders, diagnostic and therapeutic techniques and equipment), basic biomedical sciences (anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, genetics, microbiology, pharmacology, etc.), the health care system (facilities, manpower, services, administration), dentistry, nursing, and clinical psychology.
- PubMed@YaleA go-to resource for all researchers thanks to its global access. Be aware that while PubMed is a great resource, it should not be the only database you search. In fact, Ovid MEDLINE holds all the same holdings as PubMed. Each database provides different searching capabilities, making it important to know which one is best to use for your particular research needs.
- ScopusScopus is the largest citation you can access through Yale. It has publications in the health sciences, but you'll also find information relevant to public health research from social science journals here. Scopus also has interesting features for analyzing result sets, citation trends, and impact metrics for articles, authors, and journals.
- Web of ScienceWeb of Science is a multidisciplinary database offering access to a broad selection of journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, reviews, and more. Web of Science also offers citation reports that let users view connections between researchers across fields.
New Student To-Do List:
✓ Meet your Personal Librarian. They can help you with your summer research, your thesis, and more
✓Bookmark the Library Homepage for effortless access to articles, journals, and other resources the library subscribes to.
A Librarian is an often overlooked partner in research. However, there is plenty of research that supports the involvement of a Librarian in your evidence synthesis projects. One paper has shown involving a Librarian in your research projects improves reproducibility, strong search results, and better reporting (Schellinger et al, 2021).
Looking at the research process visualized below, Librarians contribute heavily to the Preparation and Retrieval stages. Approaching an evidence synthesis project requires a rigorous, comprehensive approach that yields highly relevant results from various sources.
If you aren't ready to start a project and feel unsure of how to begin, you're not alone. Librarians provide you with additional learning opportunities to provide you with a holistic view of your research.
Academic Support
@ CWML
Thesis: Your Personal Librarian provides consultations for your Thesis Project. After an initial consultation, the Librarian can help you define your research question, develop a concept table, and identify appropriate databases and journals to search.
Summer Research: Are you working on research over the summer and don't know how to start? Your Personal Librarian can equip you with skills to navigate the wide landscape of biomedical literature. They also provide effective tools to organize your projects with ease.
Citation Management: Before getting started on a new project, be prepared with citation management software. Whether it's Endnote, Zotero, or Mendeley, familiarizing yourself with this software will save you time and frustration.
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