LibGuides: Health and Human Performance: Databases

Your search strategy

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Spend a very worthwhile 30 minutes or so on our highly recommended e-tutorial LETSfind. This tutorial will show you how to:

search Summon, the Library's discovery service (which searches multiple databases at once)
run simple and more advanced searches in our databases
use Google Scholar and our tips for better Web searching
make sure you're finding the most appropriate, high-quality information you need for your assignments

What's a database?

Before databases came along, we relied on indexes, abstracts, contents pages, and a whole lot of reading when trying to find material relevant to our research.

Databases are incredibly powerful engines that allow us to search the content of thousands of journal articles by keyword, as well as provide us with electronic access to the full text of many of them. Some databases are multi-disciplinary whilst others are discipline-specific.

Lots of our databases are made available to us via the nationally funded IReL consortium (IReL stands for the Irish Research eLibrary), some we subscribe to as an institution; others are freely available online.

Below are databases we recommend for finding journal articles on health and human performance topics.

Databases we recommend for Health & Human Performance

MEDLINE via OVID This link opens in a new window Provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing with tree, tree hierarchy, subheadings and explosion capabilities to search citations from over 4,800 current biomedical journals.
PubMed This link opens in a new window freely available version of Medline.
Scopus This link opens in a new window Scopus is one of the largest multi-disciplinary abstracting and indexing databases of research literature and quality web sources. It offers access to over 16,000 titles from more than 4000 international publishers, with abstracts available back to 1966. Citation data is available from 1996. Coverage includes scientific, technical, medical and social sciences literature including, arts and humanities. There are also 23 million patent records from 5 patent offices as well as links to 'Articles in Press' from over 3,000 journals.
Sport Discus (with Full Text) This link opens in a new window SPORT Discus is an international database of references in all aspects of sports medicine, exercise physiology, biomechanics, training techniques, coaching, physical education, physical fitness, active living, recreation, history, facilities and equipment. SPORT Discus includes citations to over 47,500 books etc., and indexed articles from more than 2,000 current journals. Approximately 26,000 documents are added each year.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window

Health and Human Performance: Databases

Your search strategy

Find out more

What's a database?

Databases we recommend for Health & Human Performance

Video help