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Finding Health Information: A Path Through the Maze: Databases

This tutorial gives you an overview of key basic concepts and techniques for accessing health information using several online tools and databases.

Created by Health Science Librarians

About Databases

Databases contain references to journal articles, books, data, consumer websites and pamphlets, and often even the full text of journal articles. If you are looking for peer-reviewed articles for a class assignment, drug information, or other targeted information on a topic, you will want to search one or more of these resources.

The Health Sciences Library website provides a convenient way to access health-related electronic search tools.

The E-Research by Discipline page on the UNC Libraries web site provides access to all of the libraries' databases.

Finding Databases

The Health Sciences Library homepage features a "search widget" in the middle of the page that provides a  search box for multiple key health databases. The widget's automatic setting is to search PubMed. Click on the PubMed Search button to go directly to the PubMed search page. Links across the bottom of the search box go to other frequently used health databases. Tabs at the top provide access to a search of the E-Journals list or of the Libraries' Catalog.

Databases

The link to "more" under the Search PubMed button connects to a page with many more commonly used health sciences databases.

Use the link to the "Full listing of all databases available at UNC" on that page to find more.

Full listing

E-Research by Discipline

E-Research by Discipline on the main campus library web page organizes all of the databases available through UNC into categories by discipline, including the Health Sciences.

E-Research by Discipline