Skip to Main Content

Prevention & Community Health: Find Articles

Research Guide for the GWSPH Department of Prevention and Community Health

Good Place to Start: Citation Databases

Interdisciplinary Citation Databases:

A good place to start your research is to search a research citation database to view the scope of literature available on your topic.

TIP #1: SEED ARTICLE
Begin your research with a "seed article" - an article that strongly supports your research topic.  Then use a citation database to follow the studies published by finding articles which have cited that article, either because they support it or because they disagree with it.

TIP #2: SNOWBALLING
Snowballing is the process where researchers will begin with a select number of articles they have identified relevant/strongly supports their topic and then search each articles' references reviewing the studies cited to determine if they are relevant to your research.

BONUS POINTS: This process also helps identify key highly cited authors within a topic to help establish the "experts" in the field.

Medical Health Sciences Databases

Health Sciences Literature:

Following are core databases covering medicine, nursing, and biomedical research literature.

Subject Specific Databases

Subject Specific Databases

Depending on your topic, search the following databases to locate research on a specific topic area to help refine your search.

Multi-Disciplinary Databases

General in Scope Databases:

If your topic is broad, try the following multi-discipline databases which will include scholarly research as well as articles from newspapers, wire feeds, trade publications, reports and conference papers and proceedings.

Tip: Click "Peer-Reviewed" to refine your search to only articles in scholarly publications.

Point-of-Care

Point-of-care Databases

Provide healthcare professionals brief informative point-of-care information based on evidence based medicine.

Drug/Pharmacology Databases:

Drug Information Databases: