michigan informatics

Search a Journal Article Database

Another strategy for locating health statistics is to search PubMed and other journal article databases to locate the results of research in the published literature. This tutorial will focus on databases which are freely available online. However, there are a vast number of other resources which can be accessed for a fee. If you are affiliated with a university or a library, you should check its web site or contact a librarian to see what resources are available to you. This includes your state or local public library, which may surprise you with free remote access to some high quality interdisciplinary databases and full text journals.

For additional information on searching journal article databases, please see the tutorial on Searching the Literature.

Some databases will use a thesaurus of subject headings which can help ensure that your search is as comprehensive as possible. A thesaurus is a set of specifically defined terms which are used to describe the topics covered by each article. For example, a database might describe an article using the term Chronic Disease regardless of whether the author of the article uses the term chronic diseases, chronic illness, or chronically ill. A thesaurus allows you to search using one term and find all articles which are on that topic. The alternative is to enter every possible synonym and spelling, in hopes of anticipating the specific words that an author will use in the title or abstract of their paper.

Examples of Journal Article Databases include:

PubMed
PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 15 million citations from MEDLINE and additional life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. When searching, use the following Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to help narrow your search for statistics: economics; epidemiology; incidence; manpower; mortality; prevalence; statistics and numerical data; trends; and utilization.

AgeLine
AgeLine, published by AARP, abstracts the literature of social gerontology as well as aging-related research from psychology, sociology, social work, economics, public policy, and the health sciences. This databases uses its own thesaurus of subject headings. Adding the subject heading Statistical Data may help narrow your keyword search.

AGRICOLA
The National Agricultural Library (NAL) supports this agricultural citation database, including journal articles, book chapters, short reports, and reprints.

ERIC
A bibliographic database of over one million abstracts of journal articles and reports in education from the U.S. Department of Education. This database uses its own thesaurus of subject headings. If you Browse the Thesaurus by Category, you can see that the category Research and Theory contain a number of useful terms such as National Surveys and State Surveys.

Michigan eLibrary (MeL) Databases
The Michigan eLibrary (MeL) is a collection online resources freely available to all residents of the state of Michigan. MeL is primarily useful for its collection of bibliographic databases with links to the full text of professional and scholarly articles. Interdisciplinary databases which cover public health issues include InfoTrac OneFile, WilsonSelectPlus, and Expanded Academic ASAP.

National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) Virtual Library
The National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstracts Database contains summaries of more than 180,000 criminal justice publications. This databases uses its own thesaurus of subject headings. When you search the thesaurus for terms relating to statistics and data, you retrieve a large number of useful and specific subject headings such as Drug Statistics and Juvenile Delinquent Demographic Data. You might want to begin your search by first locating appropriate subject headings in this thesaurus.

Native Health Research Database
The Native Health Databases contain bibliographic information and abstracts of health-related articles, reports, surveys, and other resource documents pertaining to the health and health care of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Nations. This database uses the same Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that are used for PubMed.

POPLINE
POPLINE ® (POPulation information onLINE), the world's largest database on reproductive health, provides more than 300,000 citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues. When searching, enter [STATISTICS] after a keyword, e.g., INFANT MORTALITY [STATISTICS]. POPLINE uses the term statistics as a keyword modifier to indicate availability of substantive statistical data.

SafetyLit
SafetyLit is a collection of abstracts of English language reports from researchers in several disciplines relevant to preventing unintentional injuries, violence, and self-harm. The search interface allows you to limit your search by research methods, surveillance, prevalence, occurrence, cost, and more.