Key Gerontology Databases
- AgeLine (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowAgeLine focuses on those aged 50+ and the literature of social gerontology. Covers aging-related content from the health sciences, psychology, sociology, social work, economics, and public policy.
- What this includes: over 600 journals, books, book chapters, reports, dissertations, consumer guides, and educational videos..
- CINAHL Ultimate (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowCitations and abstracts of scholarly, peer-reviewed articles and professional association news and information for thousands of publications. Covers nursing and 17 allied health disciplines, going as far back as 1937. Links to PDFs or full text for Northeastern-subscribed journals.
- PsycInfo (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowAmerican Psychological Associations flagship PsycINFO database includes citations and abstracts of peer reviewed articles, books, and dissertations. Coverage from 1888 to the present. Full text links for Northeastern-subscribed materials.
- PubMed (NU customized) This link opens in a new windowA comprehensive source of journal literature in the life sciences and biomedicine from the National Library of Medicine. Includes selected full text from PubMed Central, and NCBI Bookshelf. PubMed is a free web resource, however this version contains links to Northeastern-subscribed journals that require a login.
- MEDLINE (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowMedline is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's flagship database of articles in medicine, with coverage of the most authoritative peer-reviewed biomedical and health sciences research journals. Links to full text.
- Social Sciences Premium Collection (Proquest) This link opens in a new windowScholarly and professional citations and abstracts with full text links in politics and public policy, sociology, social services, anthropology, criminology, linguistics, information sciences and education. Professional society databases included.
- Embase (Elsevier) This link opens in a new windowAn up-to-date biomedical research database covering the most important international biomedical literature from 1947 to the present day. Structured and natural language searching.
- Web of Science, All Databases This link opens in a new windowUse this link for access to citation tracking and subject searching of scholarly literature. Data visualizations, alerts, and journal impact factors. Includes the Web of Science Core Collection. One of the largest curated databases of scholarly research, with citations in some subjects from 1900 to the present.
- Cochrane Library This link opens in a new windowA full text database of high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making. Cochrane and other systematic reviews, clinical trials, and more.
- Alt-HealthWatch (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowInternational, and often peer-reviewed journals and reports on complementary, holistic and integrated approaches to health care and wellness.
- What this includes: Articles, pamplets, reports, book excerpts
- Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowScholarly, peer-reviewed articles and professional association publications, Abstracts and links to full text, about half are peer reviewed, covering all academic subjects including STEM fields.
Use this link if you want to include video clips (Opens in new window) from the Associated Press in your search results.
- Health Reference Center AcademicAccess to 5 million articles from peer-reviewed nursing, allied health, medical journals, consumer health magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, 2,500 topical overviews, newspaper articles and reference books. Also includes videos of medical procedures.
- medRxivmedRxiv is a free onlline archive of complete but unpublished manuscripts in the medical, clinical and related health sciences. med Rxiv facilitates early dissemination of new findings by allowing researchers to share manuscripts before they are peer-reviewed and published in academic journals. Hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Yale University.
Supplemental Search Tools
There are many additional tools available for searching the literature. The tools mentioned below can be valuable in surfacing relevant literature. However, one must keep in mind: many of these tools are built on open access published literature (papers which are not behind paywalls). Search tools which rely only or primarily on open access literature may give an incomplete view of existing research.
Consider these tools to be additional strategies, rather than replacements for "gold standard" databases such as PubMed.
Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered search and discovery tool. It uses machine learning techniques to extract meaning and identify connections from within papers. Its corpus of papers is considerable, but not comprehensive. Semantic Scholar sources papers from open access journals and a variety of publishing partners. One unique feature of Semantic Scholar is 'Research Feeds', which are an adaptive research recommender that uses AI to quickly learn what papers you care about reading and recommends the latest research to help you stay up to date.
Elicit
When using Elicit, you write your query as a question, and Elicit outputs relevant articles and summarizes key information from the articles. Elicit relies on the same language models which underwrite ChatGPT, with additional models and algorithms unique to Elicit. For its corpus of articles, Elicit relies on Semantic Scholar. Elicit operates on a ‘freemium’ model. So as a free user, one will have a limit on how many times you can search, and you will not have access to every feature by default. That said, even in its free version, one may find Elicit to be useful when reviewing the literature.
Scite.ai
Scite.ai is an AI-assisted tool for discovering, contextualizing, and understanding research. Northeastern University Library just recently subscribed to Scite.ai in May 2024. Scite uses deep learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques to analyze the text and citation metadata of scientific papers. Scite's Smart Citations describe the context of individual citations, both where in the article the citation occurs and whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. Scite included a variety of tools including a browser extension, custom dashboards, PDF uploader, and search. Learn more about how Scite was built in this MIT Press article.
Research Rabbit
Research Rabbit is a freely available citation-based literature mapping tool. It uses ‘seed papers’ to locate additional relevant literature via citation and collaboration networks. Read an in-depth review of Research Rabbit. PDF overview and brief tutorial from James Cook University.
LitMaps
LitMaps is another citation-based literature mapping tool, which operates on a 'freemium' model. Like Research Rabbit and Connected Papers, LitMaps uses ‘seed papers’ to locate additional relevant literature via citation and collaboration networks. LitMaps' database uses open access metadata from Semantic Scholar, CrossRef, and OpenAlex.
Connected Papers
Connected Papers is another citation-based literature mapping tool which operates on a 'freemium' model. Like LitMaps and Research Rabbit, LitMaps uses ‘seed papers’ to locate additional relevant literature via citation and collaboration networks. Connected Papers uses the Semantic Scholar database for its corpus. Learn more about Connected Papers.
Undermind.ai
Undermind is an AI-powered search engine for research articles. As of April 2024, Undermind is offering a promotion free tier for individuals. It is likely to transition to a paid model in the future. For more information, read Undermind's White Paper, as well as a review by data services librarian, Aaron Tay. At the time of the publication of the White Paper, Undermind searched ArXiv, the preprint archive. As of April 2024, it now searches Semantic Scholar's corpus of over 200 million published research articles.
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