Pharmaceutical Literature

There is a vast body of scholarly literature, mainly in the form of journal articles, available to the pharmacist and the consumer researching medications, drugs, toxicology, and other topics in pharmacology. Journal articles may present the results of clinical drug trials, present evidence regarding the relative effectiveness of one drug treatment over another, or discuss the long-term effects of a drug therapy program.

While there is some overlap between literature databases, each one provides some different searching capability or full-text access. If you are working on research project at Carolina and would like some help learning how to select and search databases, please contact librarians at the Health Sciences Library via our AskALibrarian service.

Most databases are only available by subscription; some are available via your public library if you are not a UNC affiliate.

Online Resources

PubMed MEDLINE
PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes millions of citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources.

ISI Citation Databases (Web of Science) UNC Access ONLY
The Web of Science provides Web access to the Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. These databases allow you to search forward in scholarly time by giving you links to articles that have cited an article of interest.

International Pharmaceutical Abstracts UNC Access ONLY
International Pharmaceutical Abstracts is produced by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists and includes information from over 750 pharmaceutical, medical, and health-related journals published worldwide since 1970. Topics covered include information on biopharmaceutics & pharmacokinetics, new drug delivery systems, pharmacist liability, legal, political & ethical issues, and many others.

Health Source: Nursing Edition UNC Access ONLY
Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition provides more than 400 scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Also featured are abstracts and indexing for over 500 journals. This product offering includes USP Pharmacopoeia DI: Volume II Advice for the Lay Patient and Stedman's Medical Dictionary.

Alt HealthWatch and AMED UNC Access ONLY
These two databases of literature for alternative and complementary therapies offer scholarly and consumer-oriented information. Both can be searched at once, or one can be selected to be searched alone. Alt HealthWatch "provides full text for more than 140 publications in the collection, including full text for many peer-reviewed journals... back to 1990." AMED "is a database for physicians, therapists, medical researchers and clinicians looking for information regarding alternative treatments to conventional medicine, dating back to 1985."