Searching the Web | Free vs. Fee-based Sites

• free sites (PubMed, Hardin Meta Site)
  
• fee-based sites (such as the databases your library subscribes to)
  
  TIP: Not everything is available on the Web, at any cost. For example, many more journals are available in print than are available online.
  

The scholarly peer reviewed literature is best organized and searchable using your library subscribed databases (fee-based). The web search engines allow you to search the general contents of the Web in a more haphazard and incomplete way. Although you may find links to selected full-text articles free on the Web, this represents only a small portion of the literature. Comprehensive searchers cannot rely on this small fraction of what is published.

TIP: the first place to begin a literature search is to use the library licensed electronic databases such as CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and Social Sciences Citation Index. Refer back to Module 1 for a more detailed discussion of these databases.

Scholarly literature, peer-reviewed, is expensive to produce and organize, and most bibliographic databases and full-text electronic journals are only obtained by license arrangements (e.g, NYU and Mount Sinai subscribe to a number of databases) as institutional subscriptions.

Licensed databases (fee-based) are available from your library's databases page:

• Bobst databases page at:
  http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/database.htm

  >>Information about remote access

• Mount Sinai databases page at:
  http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/databases/

  >>Information about remote access

• Ehrman databases page at:
  http://library.med.nyu.edu/library/databases/databases.html

  >>Information about remote access

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