The University of Adelaide Library

Which Database

Which Database Should I Use?

By Mick Draper
latest update March 2007

PubMed
PubMed produced by the (US) National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the database of choice for beginning most searches in the health sciences. Novice users should look at my tutorial for first year students. More experienced users may want more detail and can use one of the PubMed tutorials on the Information Sources for Health Sciences site. Users wanting to save their PubMed searches and set up alerts for new citations should look at Getting Started with My NCBI and Saving Searches. Links to all the NLM PubMed tutorials are available here.

PubMed and Medline
PubMed is more up to date than Medline and has more citations. Many of the extra citations are very recent articles that aren’t yet indexed for Medline. Most users will be keen to find these citations. You might like to look at the (US) National Library of Medicine fact sheet, What is the difference between MEDLINE and PubMed?

Scopus
Scopus is a very large database covering most of the health sciences, and life sciences as well as Physical Sciences and Social Sciences. It doesn't have a thesaurus (subject index) of its own but it can search on the subject headings assigned by PubMed and other databases. While there is considerable overlap between Scopus and PubMed there will often be articles found in one database that aren't found in the other using the same search.

Embase and PubMed
Embase is another significant health science database but it isn't available from the Uni of Adelaide Library. Embase indexes many journals not covered by PubMed. Differences in coverage vary with the particular disciplines, but Embase has more European journals, more non-English journals, and probably more drug therapy journals. Users with access to University of Adelaide teaching hospital library passwords will be able to use Embase there. It is certainly worth searching both databases for most topics.

Scopus, PubMed, and Embase
Scopus covers all the journals included in PubMed. The search algorithm in PubMed appears to be more specific but it includes explosion of MeSH. While Scopus will search MeSH it won't explode MeSH. Similarly All the Embase journals are covered by Scopus, and Scopus will search Emtree (the Embase thesaurus) but there is no explosion of Emtree terms.

Biosis Previews
Biosis Previews covers many areas of biology including life sciences and clinical material. It isn't as comprehensive as PubMed, but it may find articles that aren't included in PubMed or Embase.

Cochrane Library
Cochrane Library is a small but very important database for evidence based practice. It includes Cochrane Systematic Reviews which are considered to be the "gold standard" for evidence based practice. Cochrane Library also includes other systematic reviews, a large database of clinical trials, health technology assessments of methods and materials including drugs, and also economic assessments. Cochrane Library items are cited in PubMed but are easier to find here.

Clinical Topic Databases
PubMed, Biosis Previews and Cochrane Library are the three main databases for finding citations on clinical topics available from Uni of Adelaide Library.

Psychology
PsycInfo is the database of choice for psychology. Here you can find the basics on PsycInfo by Maureen Bell, Research Librarian for Psychology. More advanced guides on using PsycInfo are available from the American Psychological Association including guides on using the EBSCO platform version of the database. For other databases look at Maureen's list of psychology databases. PubMed will find more citations than PsycInfo on psychiatry, grief and bereavement counselling.

Australian material
Begin with the international databases listed above. Then you can search Australasian Medical Index alone or as part of AustHealth. These are very small databases and you shouldn't expect a lot of citations.

EndNote
This software will allow University of Adelaide staff, & students to import citations into personal libraries, manipulate these citations, incorporate citations into documents, and format bibliographies. Click here for the University of Adelaide Library's EndNote site.

Which Database Should I Use?

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