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Public Health

Core Databases for Public Health

PubMed/Medline

PubMed is the premier biomedical research database in the world. It has well over 35 million records. It is also the core research database for public health.

PubMed is made up of content from the Medline database plus additional content, such as books and non-indexed items. When we say PubMed, we're really referring to both the interface (i.e. the search engine and how the screen looks) and the content.

Below are 2 ways to access the same content. PubMed is free but the link includes information to ensure you can get the full text of articles. Ovid Medline has the same content (but is updated a day later than PubMed) but the search is very different. It also requires you to login with your Pitt credentials.

PubMed

MEDLINE (Ovid; for Pitt and UPMC users)

  • Articles from the worldwide biomedical literature. 
  • MEDLINE is essentially the same database as PubMed, but with a different search engine. 

Other Databases

Other research databases

The databases listed below are broad in their focus but with a strong collection of health sciences research information.

Be sure also to review other research databases and resources by department that be found in the left side menu.

APA PsycInfo (Ovid)

Produced by: American Psychological Association
About: About APA PsycInfo, "The premier abstracting and indexing database covering the behavioral and social sciences from the authority in psychology"

  • Includes articles, books, and dissertations

EMBASE (Elsevier)

  • Covers over 8,500 journal titles, with 30 million articles back to 1974
  • All disciplines of medicine and biomedical science, and includes substantial coverage of Allied Health subjects.
  • Includes Medline records

Global Health (Ovid)

  • Database covers various aspects of human health and disease; includes communicable diseases, tropical diseases, parasitic diseases and parasitology, human nutrition, community and public health, medicinal and poisonous plants.

Web of Science

Produced by: Clarivate Analytics

  • Web of Science is both a citation tracking tool (find who has cited your favorite article) and an indexing/abstracting database