Research Guides: Physical Therapy: Finding Evidence

The Library provides you access to numerous high quality databases and journals to search for evidence. Here are a couple of the top databases, journals, and other sources to consider searching when conducting research in physical therapy.

PubMed This link opens in a new window
PubMed is the National Library of Medicine's gateway to MEDLINE, a National Library of Medicine bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine and pre-clinical sciences. MEDLINE contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 5,200 biomedical journals published in the United States and 70 other countries.
CINAHL with Full Text This link opens in a new window
CINAHL Complete is a major research tool for all areas of nursing and allied health literature, with more than 600,000 full-text articles dating back to 1982. The database provides full text for more than 1,300 nursing & allied health journals indexed in CINAHL.
Cochrane Library This link opens in a new window
The Cochrane Library consists of a regularly updated collection of evidence-based medicine databases, including the Database of Systematic Reviews, the Database of Reviews of Effectiveness, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Scopus is the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, including scientific journals, books and conference proceedings, covering research topics across all scientific and technical disciplines, ranging from medicine and social sciences to arts and humanities.
Clinical Key This link opens in a new window
ClinicalKey is a clinical search engine that supports clinical decisions by making it easier to find and apply relevant knowledge. The database contains over 1,100 medical reference books and over 600 e-journals, in addition to drug monographs, guidelines, and patient education materials.
UpToDate (Restricted to HSC campus only. No remote access) This link opens in a new window
UpToDate is a point-of-care tool that synthesizes knowledge for clinicians and patients. The resource covers more than 7,400 topics in 13 medical specialties and includes more than 76,000 pages of text, graphics, links to Medline abstracts, more than 254,000 references, and a drug database.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Offers a good starting point for research on nearly any topic, covering most areas of academic study and containing full text for 5,500 periodicals, including 4,600 peer-reviewed publications. In addition to the full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,500 journals.
Consumer Health Complete This link opens in a new window
Consumer Health Complete is a portal for consumer health care information. The database provides convenient access to easily understandable health and medical information. Consumers can search and browse within medical encyclopedias, popular reference books, and magazine articles. (Courtesy of WVInfoDepot)
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research, with full text accessible via WVU Library subscriptions. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Links to library electronic resources are available to WVU students and faculty.
APA PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
Contains two million references and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books and dissertations, all in the field of psychology. Journal coverage, which spans from 1872 to the present, includes international material selected from nearly 2,000 periodicals in over 35 languages. More than 60,000 records are added each year. It also includes information about the psychological aspects of related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business and law. Examples of titles offered in PsycINFO include: Academic Medicine, Academic Psychiatry, Behavior Genetics, Behavioral Disorders, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Behavioral Medicine, Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, Journal of Psychology, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Psychological Assessment, Psychological Medicine, etc.
SafetyLit This link opens in a new window
SafetyLit is a free service of the Center for Injury Prevention Policy and Practice at San Diego State University, in collaboration with the World Health Organization. It is an injury prevention literature update and archive.

This database provides abstracts of reports from researchers who work in the more than 30 professional disciplines relevant to preventing unintentional injuries, violence, and self-harm. Among these are anthropology, economics, education, engineering specialties, ergonomics and human factors, health and medicine, law and law enforcement, psychology, sociology, and other fields.
The SafetyLit database contains current and backfile article abstracts from 6,285 active scholarly journals, and abstracts from the backfiles of 2,671 additional "inactive" journals.
The database contains article abstracts from 3,763 journals that are not included in PubMed/MEDLINE.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing for current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from high impact research journals from around the world.