Medline

Medline is a huge database managed in the USA, but with unrestricted internet access available worldwide. It contains details about 10 million published papers. You can search for whatever you want.

Some random comments:

• The more search terms you can put in, the more specific the search, but you may miss things e.g. MAOI or MAOIs may produce different papers. Best to start with wide search terms, then if there are too many hits, try adding more search terms.
• The results will appear in accession number order, which is virtually always in chronological order, newest first.
• You can get an abstract of many papers by clicking on the link. That can then be printed, copied and pasted or saved to a clipboard. Many older papers don't have abstracts.
• You can also search by year (just put the year as a search term), page number, author, volume, journal (provided you've got the exact journal name right eg Archives of General Psychiatry isn't Arch Gen Psych, but is searched via Arch Gen Psychiatry), a key word, drug, drug group etc
• Remember that it is just papers published in specific journals. It doesn't include journals not on the MedLine list (e.g. the UK Pharmaceutical Journal isn't), nor data on e.g. common side effects which is standard information not usually published per se (although may be mentioned in summaries of review articles).
• The abstract may not necessarily be exactly what is on the paper - it's only a summary.
• From experience, I can mention that not every paper is indexed fully, so if you're looking for a particular paper and can't get it, keep trying a few extra search terms and see what happens
• If you're a service user or carer, you're also free to use it. Just remember that lots gets published and it isn't necessarily completely relevant e.g. there may be a paper saying someone responded to a drug or got a side effect, but that doesn't mean that everyone will respond (after all, in depression, for example, about 30% respond to placebo) and you can't always be sure something was definitely related to a drug or therapy. There are also biases e.g. a clinical trial that shows drug X isn't any use for disease Y is much less likely to get published (because it's not very interesting, and there is a lot of work involved), but the single case or response still gets published (because it's interesting!).

Any further comments and advice? Please let Stephen Bazire know. Thanks!