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: National cancer institute: CINAHL Information Systems : Cochrane database of systematic reviews: Embase: Google scholar:

Iowa Drug Information Service: University of Iowa, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, Lexis nexis:

Lab session Using pubmed Introduction to Saudi digital library