Databases are collections of resources such as journal articles and conference papers, and also sometimes book chapters and reports. If you are doing a literature search or systematic review they are a key resource to use.

There are two main kinds of database:

• Bibliographic - these index what has been published for a particular subject area and are used to identify material that you might want to locate and study
• Full text - as well as providing the bibliographic information they also provide access to the full text of the material you may wish to read

When searching using the NHS Healthcare Databases Advanced Search (HDAS) Interface you will find links to the full text of articles when you look at your search results.  If there is no link then you should see if it is available via the King's College London A-Z list (see the Journals Tab for how to do this).  Some full text databases available to NHS staff (Proquest and Ebsco) will not work when logged in to King's College London computers due to authentication issues.

The NHS has a specially designed platform for searching databases called Healthcare Databases Advanced Search (HDAS).  This allows you to search different databases without needing to use lots of different interfaces. The databases you can search using HDAS are AMED, BNI, CINAHL, EMBASE, EMCARE, HMIC, Medline, PsycINFO and PubMed.

The following materials might be helpful in using HDAS:

For those who prefer it you can access the databases on HDAS via the original supplier interfaces by logging into My resources on OpenAthens.