Getting Started - Getting Started: Finding Scholarly Articles - LHL Guides at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences

Welcome

This guide shows how to find scholarly articles using library databases. (Searching the library website or catalog on a specific topic will not retrieve a list of articles.) Two important databases for biomedical research are PubMed and CINAHL.

To find articles, follow the 3 steps described in the box below.

Then, to learn more about each step, click on the tabs above.

Library databases

screenshot of library homepage where to find articles
To find scholarly articles for a literature review or a research paper, a good place to start is a library database.

A library database is a collection of records (usually bibliographic information) designed for rapid search and retrieval using computers.

Most contain citations and abstracts to scholarly literature in a particular subject area. Some contain some full text articles, and most offer links to the literature the UAB libraries provide.

To find scholarly articles, follow the 3 steps below:

1. Choose the right database

2. Search for citations on your topic. then browse the result list and abstracts to find articles you need to read

3. Link to full text using article linker buttons

To learn more about each step, click on the tabs above. Check out the demonstration for the database you want to use, and the instructions for citing the articles found.

Important Databases

Working on the Open Web

This video shows how to get full text by using PubMed from the LHL Homepage. If your article is not in PubMed, try the Google Scholar tab or Scopus tabs, putting the article title in quotes.