Background Sources - Medical Design For Low Resource Environments - Pittsburgh Campus

Resources for Articles, Country Data, and Demographics

Engineering Information:

Engineering Databases
This page lists the databases that are important for engineering research.

The following databases will be particularly useful for this course:

BCC Research This link opens in a new window
Reports on major economic, scientific, and technological developments in industrial, pharmaceutical, and high technology worldwide.
IEEEXplore This link opens in a new window
Access to technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics.
Knovel Engineering and Scientific Online References This link opens in a new window
Database of the fulltext of some of the leading engineering reference handbooks, databases, and conference proceedings. Provides tabular and graphical data, including facts, figures, formulas and definitions.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Web of Science provides access to Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index.

Medical Information:

Medical Databases
This page lists the A-Z databases that are important for medical research, accessed through the Health Sciences Library System.

The following databases will be particularly useful for this course:

PubMed This link opens in a new window
PubMed comprises more than 22 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

search.bioPreprint
The Health Science Library System (HSLS) has developed a tool, search.bioPreprint, that helps researchers to comprehensively search preprint databases to discover cutting edge, yet-to-be published or reviewed biomedical research articles. This is a one-stop shop for finding preprints from multiple preprint databases, including: arXiv, bioRxiv, F1000Research, PeerJ Preprints.

How to Search PubMed:

Follow this guide to find full text articles on PubMed.

Subscription Databases:

These are selected sources available through the ULS that feature numerical data and statistical information related to global health.

Statistical Insight
Provides abstracting, indexing, and full text for publications from hundreds of public domain and licensed sources.
Social Explorer
Social Explorer is mainly an interactive map of demographic information drawn from the US Census. Users can examine geographic areas while selecting the type of data to be shown, such as population density or income level. Note: Creation of a Personal Account is required to fully access all Social Explorer features.
Historical Statistics of the United States
Presents mainly US census data for the nation as a whole, such as immigration statistics by country of origin or mortality rates by disease, ranging back to the 1800s.

Web-based Statistics:

These web-based resources feature numerical data and statistical information related to global health. They are freely accessible.

WHO Global Health Observatory
GHO provides easy access to country data and statistics with a focus on comparable estimates.
World Bank Health, Nutrition, and Population
The World Bank's Health, Nutrition and Population (HNP) statistics.
Demography and Health Surveys Data
Funded by USAID, this site has ready-to-use data for over 90 countries from over 300 surveys.
General Social Survey (GSS)
Provides information on societal trends, including health issues such as number of hospitalizations and depression rates, in the US and compares the US to other countries.

UNdata
Find international statistics collected by the United Nations and related organizations.