Secondary Resources

• Secondary literature refers to references that either index or abstract the primary literature

• Its goal is directing the user to the

primary literature.

• Indexing: providing bibliographic citation information (e.g., title, author, and citation of the article)

• Abstracting: includes a brief

description (or abstract) of the information provided by the article or resource cited

• majority of secondary resources are utilized primarily in an electronic format

• Electronic databases offer some advantages over print listings

• Frequent updating• Ease of use

• Searches generally use Boolean operators

• AND• OR• NOT

• Some databases allow searches to be limited by a variety of factors:

− language of publication − year of publication − type of article (e.g., human study, review, and

case report) − type of journal

• This is most helpful when the initial search terms return a large number of possible matches

Secondary Resources

• Examples:• Medline (Pubmed): National Library of

Medicine: http://www.nlm.nih.gov• National cancer institute:

http://www.cancer.gov• CINAHL Information Systems :

http://www.cinahl.com• Cochrane database of systematic

reviews: http://www.cochrane.org• Embase: http://www.embase.com• Google scholar:

http://scholar.google.com/

• Iowa Drug Information Service: University of Iowa, http://itsnt14.its.uiowa.edu/

• International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, http://www.ashp.org

• Lexis nexis: http://www.lexisnexis.com

Lab session

• Using pubmed

• Introduction to Saudi digital library