Library Guides: BBH 451: Pharmacological Influences on Health (Harrisburg): Finding Information About Drugs

Freely-Available Resources

Most of the sites in this list are authored by federal agencies and are intended for consumers. These are good places to start for drugs you're not familiar with, and for providing advice in everyday language:

Drug Information Portal
A gateway to basic information and research studies on thousands of drugs, compiled by the National Library of Medicine.
RXList
A tool from WebMD that provides comprehensive information about prescription drugs.
National Center for Complimentary and Integrative Health: Health Topics A to Z
From acai to yoga, this site offers links to the research base (or lack thereof) for many alternative treatments.
Drug Facts
From the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Offers information on illegal (street) drugs.
National Institute on Drug Abuse
A portal to fact sheets, clinical and treatment information, federally-funded research, and more.
FindTreatment.gov
Here, you can search for treatment centers by zip code.

Professional-Level Resources

Nursing Reference Center Plus This link opens in a new window
Intended for nurses, this database is a helpful bridge between freely-available web sites that are sometimes too basic, and the medical literature which can be difficult to understand.

Nursing Reference Center (NRC) is a point-of-care resource intended for staff nurses, nurse administrators, nursing students, nurse faculty, and hospital librarians. It delivers the best available and most recent clinical evidence and knowledge on conditions and diseases via a nursing-specific graphical interface. NRC is accessible from a patient’s bedside, nursing station, kiosk, office, or home.

AHFS Drug Information
A standard tool used by pharmacists.
Merck Manual Professional Version
A standard resource for medical information. See the tabs at the top of the screen for medical topics, drug information, and more.

AccessMedicine This link opens in a new window
A gateway to medical books, including information about drugs.

AccessMedicine® is an online reference and practice resource providing access to more than 85 medical titles, thousands of images, integrated drug database, diagnostic tools, multimedia, patient education, and more, all on a comprehensive search platform and accessible on a mobile device.

Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology
Professional-level encyclopedia of chemistry and chemical technology.

Digging Deeper

Resources by Question Type
This handy chart from the University of Washington Health Science Library suggests particular databases and websites based on what you want to know about a certain drug. We don't have access to many of them at Penn State Harrisburg, but you may be able to use them at Penn State Hershey College of Medicine's Harrell Health Sciences Library.

CINAHL (Cumulative Index for Nursing and Allied Health) This link opens in a new window
The most helpful database for nursing and allied health. Can "limit" searches to evidence-based practice, specific age groups, or other criteria.

One of two major databases for nursing, providing references to over 1,800 nursing and allied health journal articles in addition to citations for book chapters, nursing dissertations, association publications, educational software, conference proceedings and selected full-text for state nursing journal articles, legal cases, patient education material, research instruments, standards of practice, critical paths, nurse practice acts, drugs, clinical innovations and government publications. References for alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and health sciences librarianship are also included. Coverage: 1982 - Present. Updates: Monthly.
PubMed (Medline) This link opens in a new window
The National Library of Medicine's database for medical journal articles.

PubMed is a web interface that allows you to search MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's premier database of citations and abstracts for biomedical research articles. The core subject is medicine, but subject coverage also includes bioethics, biology, chemistry, dentistry, environmental health, genetics, gerontology, health care planning and administration, history of medicine, hospital administration, microbiology, nutrition, nursing (International Nursing Index), physiology, pre-clinical sciences, public health, sports medicine, veterinary medicine and zoology. MEDLINE covers over 4,800 journals published in the United States and 70 other countries. The database contains over 15 million citations dating back to 1950. Coverage is worldwide and updated weekly. Learn more about PubMed at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/pubmed.html. or Try the Tutorial at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed_tutorial/m1001.html
PsycINFO (via ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
The best database for articles in Psychology. Helpful for topics concerning mental illnesses, and behavioral/psychological aspects of disease.

PsycINFO provides access to international literature in psychology and related disciplines. Unrivaled in its depth of psychological coverage and respected worldwide for its high quality, the database is enriched with literature from an array of disciplines related to psychology such as psychiatry, education, business, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, law, linguistics, and social work. Nearly all records contain nonevaluative summaries, and all records from 1967 to the present are indexed using the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.

LionSearch Advanced Search
A shortcut to finding research studies and other information available through Penn State University Libraries. Use the drop-down boxes on the left side of the page to focus your search by author, title, etc.
Biobehavioral Health Subject Guide
The library's guide to databases and another information resources for biobehavioral health.