Research Guides: Evidence Synthesis in the Social Sciences: Select databases

Database Selection

Why It is important to select multiple databases

To be comprehensive
Interdisciplinary topics
Minimize biases
Searching for Grey Literature
Broaden your geographic scope

Database Content to look for:

Years of Coverage
Publication types you want
- Dissertations
- Scholarly literature
- Government documents
- Grey literature
Publication types you do not want
- Trade literature
- News

Systematic reviews: 3: Target appropriate resources with effective strategies. Library Guides. (n.d.). Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://unimelb.libguides.com/sysrev/search-strategies

CABI (Web of Science)
CAB Abstracts covers research and development literature in the fields of agriculture, forestry, human health, human nutrition, animal health and the management and conservation of natural resources. Includes CAB Abstracts Archive. Global Health is a public health database that provides information on international health, biomedical life sciences, non-communicable diseases, public health nutrition, food safety and hygiene, and much more. This database contains more than 1.2 million records dating back to 1973.
Scopus
Scopus is a citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track analyze and visualize research. Tools to sort, refine and quickly identify results help researchers focus on the outcome of their work.
CAB Abstracts [Selected Full Text]
CAB Abstracts covers research and development literature in the fields of agriculture, forestry, human health, human nutrition, animal health and the management and conservation of natural resources. Includes CAB Abstracts Archive.
PsycINFO
Provides access to the international literature in psychology and material relevant to psychology in the related disciplines of education, medicine, business, sociology, psychiatry and communications. Includes journals and dissertations from1967 to the present in one database, and book chapters and books from 1987 to the present in a second database. The databases are in English and the journals covered are in 30 languages from over 45 countries. The databases provide citations, content summaries (for all but the dissertations), and indexing using terms from the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. Book records also contain the book's table of contents.
SocINDEX with Full Text [Selected Articles in Full Text]
Index, abstracts, and full text for publications in sociology. Includes content from the EBSCO Sociological Collection database.
Communication & Mass Media Complete [Selected Articles in Full Text]
Communication & Mass Media Complete incorporates CommSearch (formerly produced by the National Communication Association) and Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Penn State) along with numerous other journals to create a research and reference resource in the communication and mass media fields. CMMC offers cover-to-cover (core) indexing and abstracts for over 300 journals, and selected (priority) coverage of over 100 more, for a combined coverage of over 400 titles. Furthermore, this database includes full text for nearly 200 journals. Many major journals have indexing, abstracts, PDFs and searchable citations from their first issues to the present (dating as far back as 1915). CMMC contains a sophisticated controlled vocabulary and comprehensive reference browsing (i.e. searchable citations for all peer-reviewed journals covered as core).

Database search features

Subject headings
Boolean, proximity
Ease of combining sets
Advanced searching
- Searching particular fields
- Command line searching

Systematic reviews: 3: Target appropriate resources with effective strategies. Library Guides. (n.d.). Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://unimelb.libguides.com/sysrev/search-strategies

Sources for grey literature

Grey Literature is material that is published outside of traditional publishing
Grey literature examples could include government publications, conference proceedings, a thesis, and/or conference abstracts.