CAB Abstracts (1910 - ) 
Features include: world coverage of veterinary medicine, animal science, parasitology / helminthology, nutrition, reproduction, husbandry, etc. Also includes agricultural topics such as crop science, horticulture, fertilizer, agricultural engineering, rural sociology and development.

• Covers journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and technical reports.
• Searching:
  • Need to enter synonyms and related terms
  • Search for US / UK spelling variations, e.g., soybean* or soyabean*.
  • Author name search: use hyphen as "lastname-i or lastname-*" (* is a truncation symbol)
  • Use the thesaurus and index tools
• Updated quarterly.

PubMed (MEDLINE) (1950s - ) 
Focus on medical science journal information including veterinary medicine with the utmost emphasis on human medicine. Most useful for bacteriology, virology, parasitology, food contamination, epidemiology, public health, and clinical specialties such as oncology, dentistry, ophthalmology, etc. Indexes 4800+ journals, including nearly 100 veterinary journals.

• Search tips:
  • Use the MESH Database to search Medical Subject Headings for accurate and comprehensive retrieval.
  • In the Preview / Index tab, search for Authors by entering "lastname, first initial"
• Updated daily.
• Sign up for a "MyNCBI" account, and get e-mail alerts about new articles in your subject area.
• NCBI's PubMed Help

Note: Medline is also available for searching via the OVID search interface, the Web of Knowledge search interface, and in combination with Embase.

EmBase (1974-present for Embase; 1950s-present for Medline/PubMed)
Identifies biomedical and pharmacological articles; simultaneously searches Medline (PubMed) and Embase.

• Over 6,500 journals are indexed from 70 countries.
• At least 2000 of the journals covered in EmBase are not covered in Medline.
• The international coverage focuses on Western Europe and the US. Cochrane Study Groups are required to use both the Medline and Embase databases in developing their Systematic Reviews of the literature.
• Searching:
  • Author: You can enter either a last name (e.g. Smith), which prompts EMBASE.com to provide a list of all authors with this name, or you can directly enter a specific author name using one or more initials (e.g. Smith J ; Smith J.E.)
  • Journals: Journals allows you to browse through the titles, volumes, issues and Tables of Contents (TOCs) of individual journals. You can also scan through journals by topic (e.g. Toxicology or Veterinary Medicine).
  • EmTree Keywords are hierarchical subject thesaurus of over 48,000 preferred terms at all levels of specificity, supplemented by nearly 200,000 synonyms. You can scan EMTREE by browsing within subject categories (‘trees’), or find the best individual terms for your search. EmTree is similar to the MESH headings found in Medline / PubMed.
• Caveat: be sure to choose to search "all dates". The default is set to search the most recent four years.
• Updated daily.

ToxNet (Toxicology Data Network):
Fourteen databases on toxicology, hazardous chemicals, environmental health, and toxic releases. Available to search for free.

A subset of ToxNet is ToxLine, which is an extensive array of references to the literature on biochemical, pharmacological, physiological, and toxicological effects of drugs and other chemicals. Search Toxline ToxLine via the free site, or via the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts search interface.

Biological Abstracts  (1969 - )  
Worldwide coverage of over 4,000 life science journals. Best place to search for wildlife, environmental toxicology, and other biological topics.

• Covers: journal articles only.
• Search tips:
  • Best to use genus species names for searching organisms.
  • Use concept codes to retrieve subject areas such as environmental toxicology, pathology, chemical constituencies of plants, etc.
  • Author search: enter "lastname initial*" or use the author index to pick author names.
• Updated every two months
• Tutorial for Biological Abstracts

International Pharmaceutical Abstracts  (1970 - ) 
Identifies articles related to the field of pharmaceuticals including drug therapy, toxicity and economics.

• IPA provides citations and abstracts for articles in more than 650 pharmacy journals about drugs, pharmacy practice, and pharmaceutical education.
• Updated monthly.

Web of Science  (1980-)
Online version of three Citation Indexes: Humanities, Social Science, and Science.

• Over 8,000 journals are indexed from all disciplines. Of these, over 5,400 are in the sciences and over 120 related to veterinary medicine.
• There are two search modes, General and Cited Reference.
  • General Search:
    • Search for articles by topic, author, journal, institution.
    • Author search: enter "lastname (space) initial*" or use the author index
    • Journal title search: use the source titles list to pick title(s)
  • Cited Reference:
    • Search for articles that have cited a specific article or are cited by articles. Usually start with a known author.
    • Best place to determine the correct citation for a reference, if the one you have seems to be incorrect.
    • Best place for tracking down obscure reference outside the scope of other databases mentioned above
• Updated weekly.
• How to use Web of Science, a 2-page flyer.

Current Contents (1994 - ) 
Provides content pages of over 8,000 journals in all subjects including veterinary medicine and animal science. Features currency and table of contents in each journal covered. Includes series such as Methods in Enzymology but rarely books.

Note: Consider using Web of Science, instead. The baseline database is the same, but we have Web of Science back further in time. Additionally, Web of Science has many unique journal citation tracing features that Current Contents does not.

• Searching tips:
  • Include synonyms and related terms.
  • Watch out for mismatched abbreviations.
  • Author search: enter "lastname (space) initial$" (Lastname alone will work for unique names.)
• Updated weekly

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Updated: 3/19/07 YG