Sources of Information 4. Medline Tutorial 7. Citing References 8. Assessment Exercise 5. Major Databases for Medicine Electronic databases provide access to the contents of a wide range of medical journals and other types of information such as conference papers and book chapters.
Access is through CD-ROM and online through the world wide web .
These databases offer a quick and effective way of searching for references to journal articles, a far less cumbersome process than scanning through individual journals. Others give you a summary or abstract of the article which helps you decide whether it is relevant to your subject. In deciding which database to use you need to look at the subject areas that they cover. Some cover a wide area of the literature relevant to medicine, others have a narrower remit. None of them will necessarily cover all the journals where you may find relevant articles so you should consider using more than one.