Online Resources
This is a list and description of online resources that will help you in your research of articles, journals and ways to improve clinical practice. Of course, this is only a partial list of the many available search engines. We hope it serves as a guidepost to your continuing education.
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Basic Search Engines
Contains articles from the back issues of over 900 magazines, journals, trade publications and newspapers. Search our online article archive or browse by category. This site is not specific to health care.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
This is an award-winning Federal Web site, developed by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services together with other Federal agencies.
HighWire Press is a division of the Stanford University Libraries producing online versions of peer-reviewed journals and scholarly content.
The world's largest medical library.
PsycBITETM is a database that catalogues studies of cognitive, behavioral and other treatments for psychological problems and issues occurring as a consequence of acquired brain impairment (ABI). The types of studies contained on this database are Systematic Reviews, Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT), Non-Randomized Controlled Trials (non-RCT), Case Series (CS), and Single Subject Design (SSD).
The following databases are great resources for researching articles and journals.
This website focuses on serving the growing needs of healthcare providers, students, nurses and consumers by improving existing content of databases while creating new ways to incorporate emerging knowledge.
PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources
Medscape is a web resource for physicians and other health professionals. It features peer-reviewed original medical journal articles, CME (Continuing Medical Education), a customized version of the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE database, daily medical news, major conference coverage, and drug information -- including a drug database and drug interaction checker. The site is free to use for professionals and consumers, but registration is required.
National Guideline Clearinghouse
The National Guideline Clearinghouse™ (NGC) is a comprehensive database of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and related documents. NGC is an initiative of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NGC was originally created by AHRQ in partnership with the American Medical Association and the American Association of Health Plans (now America's Health Insurance Plans [AHIP]).
PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature
Useful Websites for Research Search Engines
Center for Evidence-Based Therapy (Netherlands)
The mission of this site is to search, collect and disseminate available scientific evidence for healthcare workers, nurses, therapists, patients and financiers of healthcare.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Categorized, searchable links to free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.
Education Resources Infomation Center
ERIC provides free access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials and, if available, includes links to full text. ERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
Evidence-Based Review of Stroke Rehabilitation
The Evidence-Based Review of Stroke Rehabilitation (EBRSR) reviews current practices in stroke rehabilitation. The purpose of this site is maintaining timely and accurate information on effective stroke rehabilitation, identifying ideas for further research, supporting continuous peer-review and encouraging improved evidence-based practice.
This website hosts a great search engine on spinal cord injuries and disease and the latest research. It has printable brochures on clinical practice guidelines and other information for clinicians and caregivers. Core to PVA's mission of research and education is connecting people to information, and each other.
PEDro – Physiotherapy Evidence Database
PEDro is the Physiotherapy Evidence Database. It has been developed to give rapid access to bibliographic details and abstracts of randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews and evidence-based clinical practice guidelines in physiotherapy. Most trials on the database have been rated for quality to help you quickly discriminate between trials, which are likely to be valid and interpretable and those which are not.
The Cochrane Collaboration produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other studies of interventions. The major product of the Collaboration is the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, which is published quarterly as part of The Cochrane Library.