Introduction
The clinical question deals with public health and health behaviors, so there is a benefit to focusing on medical-oriented databases. PubMed was the first choice, as it is a free search engine accessing the MEDLINE database which consists mostly of medical, life sciences, and biomedical research. The database is overseen by the government through the United States National Library of Medicine.
Discussion
The database interface is simple, highly intuitive, and easy to understand. It allows searching by keywords and phrases, providing results found by citation matching first. There are also numerous options including results by year, article type, and text availability (Sanyal et al., 2019). Through the advanced search query, terms can be searched by any category ranging from author and publisher to heading/title and journal.
Another database is CINHL which is a database run by EBSCO, focused on indexing nursing, biomedicine, and allied health journals. Although sharing many of the options with the typical database features, CINHL is fully subscription-based. It has the benefits of searchable references, subject headings, and indexing and stands as one of the leading databases of nursing literature. Finally, there is the Cochrane Library, a British-based organization. Unlike the other databases described, it is a collection of databases in medicine and other medical sciences, but it centers around Cochrane Reviews, which is a well-known database for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Cochrane is also largely subscription-based. It has a more outdated interface which is complex to navigate but offers a wide variety of options for searching (Kipnis et al., 2022).
Conclusion
Therefore, bringing it all together, each database is best for different disciplines in healthcare. PubMed would be best for allied health, CINHL for nursing-related interventions, and Cochrane for medical/biomedical and clinical subjects. There is also the difference of being open access and subscription, although the databases commonly share many of their unique journal articles and research with each other. PubMed is open source and unfiltered source of content but lacks the careful pre-filtered content that could be seen in CINHL, while Cochrane offers a broader coverage across multiple databases that others cannot offer. Finally, there is the ease of use, where PubMed offers easy keyword searching and related citations, others have more advanced features such as more options in advanced search with subheadings that can narrow the topic (Bramer et al., 2018). The other two also have greater matching and guided mapping of keywords with extensive limiting options available.
References
Bramer, W. M., De Jonge, G. B., Rethlefsen, M. L., Mast, F., & Kleijnen, J. (2018). A systematic approach to searching: an efficient and complete method to develop literature searches.Journal of the Medical Library Association, 106(4).
Kipnis, D. G., Adriani, L. A., & Kolbin, R. I. (2022). Databases for researching athletic training literature.Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 41(1), 86–94.
Sanyal, D. K., Bhowmick, P. K., & Das, P. P. (2019). A review of author name disambiguation techniques for the PubMed bibliographic database. Journal of Information Science, 016555151988860.