Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature covering scientific journals, books, conference proceedings, datasets, and funding data dating back to 1970. Delivering a comprehensive overview of the world’s research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine social sciences and arts, and humanities. Scopus features tools to track, analyze and visualize research.
Provides over 20,000 indexed and abstracted journals including 6,600 full-text journals and magazines, nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed journals. PDF content dating back to 1887.
Provides indexing for 3,024 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health and provides full text for hundreds of journals, plus legal cases, clinical innovations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments and clinical trials.
The database contains a comprehensive listing of brand name product ingredients available. The Brand Product Report for each brand name product provides a quick summary of safety, effectiveness, drug interactions, and adverse effects for each ingredient contained in the product.
PubMed comprises over 23 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content in library subscription databases, from PubMed Central, and publisher web sites.
Provides over 20,000 indexed and abstracted journals including 6,600 full-text journals and magazines, nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed journals. PDF content dating back to 1887.
PubMed comprises over 23 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content in library subscription databases, from PubMed Central, and publisher web sites.
Includes access to over 1,800 professional journals, chapters, books, reports, theses and dissertations, published internationally. Additionally, there are more than 8 million cited references in 185,000 journal articles, books, and book chapters.
Covers more than 140 local, city, state and regional business publications as well as business-oriented newswire services across the U.S. and Canada.
Search hedges are used to find a higher number of articles about your topic. Search hedges are made up of subject headings, keywords, and synonyms separated by the word OR. Search hedges should be used carefully as they are database specific.
Multiple researchers (Anders, Evans, 2010; Boeker et al, 2013; Haddaway et. al, 2015; Gusenbauer and Haddaway, 2020) have found Google Scholar to be an inadequate source for scholarly articles for systemic reviews in the medical field. Anders & Evans (2010) did a side by side comparison with Google Scholar PubMed and found that Pub Med had better recall and precision in results than Google Scholar and concluded that PubMed's ability to create exact clinical searches with specific medical terminology gave it a significant advantage over Google. When Haddaway et al examined Google Scholar's strength in searching for gray literature they found that it could not compete with a strong Web of Science search; GS still missed important literature in their estimation (2015). Overwhelming, researchers recommend Google Scholar only be used in addition to other traditional academic databases.
For non medical fields, Google Scholar may be a good supplmental choice, particularly for grey literature. However, Gusenbauer and Haddaway (2020) goes as far as to say "Google Scholar's extraordinary coverage acting as a multidisciplinary compendium of scientific world knowledge should not blind users to the fact that users' ability to access this compendium is severely limited, especially in terms of a systematic search. Google Scholar does not publically disclose their search engine's althogrims, nor do they accurately explain what is included in their search results" (211). Google Scholar's search interface lacks most of the features systematic reviewers find the most useful including commanded line searches, saved history and consistency in results.
If you would like to use Google Scholar in your systematic reviews as a supplement, please consider speaking to a librarian to make sure you are using Google Scholar to its fullest potential.
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Works cited
Grey literature sources include things like conference proceedings, dissertations, reports, clinical trials, and more. When you begin your systematic review and are determining the scope of your research, you'll decide whether or not to include grey literature in your review. The inclusion of grey literature is common in business, economics, and political science disciplines. A subject librarian can advise you where to search for grey literature.