Anesthesia: A Guide to Library Research

Since it is important to use very up-to-date information in all areas of health care, you will primarily use journal articles as sources for research papers in Anesthesia, and to find them you will mostly use the databases PubMed and CINAHL (the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature).  These provide the most comprehensive indexing of journals published in medicine and health care.  Links to these databases are provided on the Overview page of this guide. 

Both of these databases offer the ability to limit results by date, to get the most recent research, and to limit to articles that report on research studies.

Are you confused about what an article is? Or what the difference is between a scholarly article and one from a newspaper or magazine?

A journal can be similar to a magazine, but journals are published by universities or professional organizations. Magazines are published by corporations. Articles that are published in academic journals are written by experts in a specific field and then submitted to a panel of other experts who examine the article to see if it holds up to the high standards of academic publishing. This is called peer review. Most academic journals are very narrow in focus and are written for a specific audience, unlike magazines which normally have a broader focus and are published to be read by as many people as possible. Most academic articles will have a bibliography at the end.