Literature databases are typically composed of records that describe articles that were published in scholarly journals, trade journals, newspapers and magazines, as well as resources like conference proceedings and papers, reports, and government or legal publications.
Databases may be multidisciplinary/multipurpose, or have a subject-specific focus that determines which sources get indexed into records for the database, based on subject focus, date coverage, and material type.
Some databases may be entirely bibliographic, meaning they contain only records that describe literature. Other databases are considered full-text, which means that in addition to bibliographic descriptions, they contain the entire texts of the associated document. Other databases may contain full text content for a subset of their records.
Databases are typically made available electronically on a commercial basis by public or private database producers (sometimes known as vendors), who provide a platform to access and search the database. Common database vendors include ProQuest, EBSCO and Ovid.
The evidence needed to answer specific, narrow research questions is most frequently located in the scholarly literature, which is indexed into the core health sciences databases. While there is some overlap in the publications that are indexed in these databases, they each have a unique depth of coverage in particular topics. As such, it is important that a comprehensive literature search includes multiple databases.
PsycINFO is available two platforms, Ovid and APA PscyNET:
In addition to searching the core health sciences database, you might also find it useful to expand your search in other, multidisciplinary sources:
For a more complete list of health sciences databases, visit the Find Articles/Databases page.
