Starting your Search - what to use? - Developing Literature Searching and Evaluation Skills for ERM Module (HWLS)

Key Databases for Nursing & Midwifery, Health and Social Care

These are the key databases that cover Health and Social Care literature. Each database has some information about what it covers and what it is appropriate for, so please read the information carefully to help you choose which one to use.

CINAHL Complete
I’m having a makeover! This database will be changing its interface on Monday 7th July 2025. This means that the database will look different, and some of the features available will change. Make sure you export the contents of your custom folders before the switchover. For more information on these changes, read our new EBSCOhost interface guide: https://tinyurl.com/ebsco2025
Cinahl Complete with Full Text, the authoritative bibliographic database for nursing and allied health, provides full text for 1350 journals. alternative link

Coverage is from 1937 onwards and also includes books, nursing dissertations, conference proceedings and standards of practice.Cross search available with all EBSCO databases, select Choose Databases and tick those you wish to add to your search.
MEDLINE (Ebsco)

I’m having a makeover! This database will be changing its interface on Monday 7th July 2025. This means that the database will look different, and some of the features available will change. Make sure you export the contents of your custom folders before the switchover. For more information on these changes, read our new EBSCOhost interface guide: https://tinyurl.com/ebsco2025
MEDLINE provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system and pre-clinical sciences.
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Created by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing with tree hierarchy, subheadings and explosion capabilities to search citations from over 4,800 current biomedical journals. Included are citations from Index Medicus, International Nursing Index, Index to Dental Literature, HISTLINE, SPACELINE, PREMEDLINE, AIDSLINE, BIOETHICSLINE, and HealthSTAR.
Cross search available with all EBSCO databases, select Choose Databases and tick those you wish to add to your search.
APA PsycInfo
This database is published by the American Psychological Associations and provides comprehensive indexing and abstracts of the international psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. Documents indexed include journals, articles, books, dissertations and more. 90% of the 3,000+ titles indexed in APA PsycINFO® are peer-reviewed.

Coverage: 1806 - current
Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA)
Index and abstracts for health, social services, psychology, criminology, sociology, economics, politics, race relations and education. Currently contains over 312,000 records from 650 journals in 16 different countries, including the UK and US. Coverage is from 1987 onwards. Updated monthly, with more than 1500 records added per update.
Maternity and Infant Care
Maternity and Infant Care is an important essential resource for academics and healthcare professionals involved in the care of women and infants. Access to this database through SHU has a limit of 10 users at once. If you receive an error message saying the database is unavailable, it may be that there are already 10 people from SHU accessing the Maternity and Infant Care database at that time - we recommend trying again later.

Contains over 120,000 references with abstracts to journal articles from over 550 international English language journals, books, and grey literature relating to the midwifery profession, pregnancy, labor, birth, postnatal care, and neonatal care and the first year of an infant's life. Database coverage is from the mid-1980s and approximately 1000 records are added to the database per month.

Multidisciplinary Databases

It may be that you need to widen your net to find more articles and evidence for your studies.

The databases in this list cover lots of different disciplines, not exclusive to health research, although many contain Health and Social Care content. They index thousands of journal articles and may also link to the full text.

SCOPUS and Web of Science are also citation databases, which may help you to track down related research to your area of study.

SCOPUS
Scopus is a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary abstract and database curated by subject matter experts. Scopus is also a citation index, which means that the records in the database contain information on citations made in that publication and it links that information so you can identify which publications have cited that one, and how many times a publication has been cited.
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect provides journal articles and eBooks on the physics, engineering, mathematics, life sciences, health, computing and social sciences. The default search includes both ebooks and journal articles. You can use filters in your results to select between them: alternatively, you can use the search tab. Search results for eBooks are at chapter level.
Alternative link via Shibboleth
Articles and eBooks can be downloaded, saved permanently and kept as PDFs that you can view offline.
Web of Science
Web of Science provides access to a collection of databases. The default search is of the Web of Science Core Collection, which includes the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index and Emerging Sources Citation Index. This enables you to search scholarly journals, books and proceedings in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities and navigate the citation network.
By clicking on the drop-down menu next to ‘Search in:’ you can choose to search other databases: BIOSIS Citation Index (1969-2008), KCI-Korean Journal Database, Medline, Preprint Citation Index and SciELO Citation Index.
Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA)
Index and abstracts for health, social services, psychology, criminology, sociology, economics, politics, race relations and education. Currently contains over 312,000 records from 650 journals in 16 different countries, including the UK and US. Coverage is from 1987 onwards. Updated monthly, with more than 1500 records added per update.
Proquest Central
A multi-disciplinary full text database covering business, health and medical, social sciences, education , science and technology, including core titles in the performing and visual arts, history, religion, philosophy, and language and literature. It includes both scholarly journals as well as market research and industry reports, working papers and full-text dissertations.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a search engine that covers scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. You can use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, as well as scholarly articles available from across the web.

Be aware that Google scholar will find results from sources that SHU does not subscribe to so you may not automatically be able to get full text online. You can take advantage of the SHU subscriptions by going to Scholar Preferences and adding Sheffield Hallam University when prompted for a library name. This will add a SHU Links link to your Google Scholar searches which will identify what you can get via SHU subscriptions. However, we still advise that you access Google Scholar via Library Gateway as this will give you access to the full range of subscribed resources.

Developing Literature Searching and Evaluation Skills for ERM Module (HWLS): Starting your Search - what to use?

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Key Databases for Nursing & Midwifery, Health and Social Care

Multidisciplinary Databases

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