Systematic Reviews: Searching : Bibliographic Databases

MEDLINE currently contains over 16 million references to journal articles from the 1950s to the present. Currently 5,200 journals in 37 languages are indexed.

Cinahl provides authoritative coverage of the journal literature related to nursing and allied health. 

In addition to MEDLINE and EMBASE, which are generally considered to be the key international general healthcare databases, many countries and regions produce electronic bibliographic databases that concentrate on the literature produced in those regions, and which often include journals and other literature not indexed elsewhere. Access to many of these databases is available free of charge on the internet. Others are only available by subscription or on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis. 

Africa: African Index Medicus 

Australia: Australasian Medical Index (fee-based) 

China: Chinese Biomedical Literature database (in Chinese)

Eastern Mediterranean:Index Medicus for the Eastern Mediterreanian region

Europe: PASCAL (fee-based)

India: IndMED 

Korea: KoreaMed

Latin America and the Caribbean: LILACS

South-East Asia: Index Medicus for the South-East Asia Region (IMSEAR)

Ukraine and the Russian Federation: Panteleimon

Western Pacific: Western Pacific Region Index Medicus (WPRIM)

EMBASE contains over 11 million records from 1974 to the present. Currently 4,800 journals are indexed for EMBASE in 30 languages. 

PsycInfo covers professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines including medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, and other areas. 

Biology and pharmacology

• Biological Abstracts

Health promotion

• DoPHER (database of promoting health effectiveness reviews): free on the internet

International health

• POPLINE (reproductive health) (free on the internet)

Nursing and allied health

• AMED (allied and complementary medicine): fee-based, available from Ovid 
• MANTIS (osteopathy and chiropractic)
• OTseeker (occupational therapy): free on the internet
• PEDro (physiotherapy evidence database):  free on the internet

Social and community health and welfare

• CommunityWISE
• Social Care Online: free on the internet
• Social Services Abstracts

Social science, education, psychology and psychiatry

• ASSIA  (applied social sciences index and abstracts) 
•  ERIC education resources information center
• Social Policy and Practice (evidence-based social science research): fee-based, available from Ovid
• Sociological Abstracts

The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) serves as the most comprehensive source of reports of controlled trials and is updated quarterly.  CENTRAL contains nearly 530,000 citations of which 310,000 trial reports are from MEDLINE, 50,000 additional trial reports are from EMBASE and the remaining 170,000 are from other sources such as other databases and handsearching.

The Web of Science databases allow current and retrospective searching of quality, peer-reviewed journals, providing complete bibliographic data, full-length author abstracts, and cited references.