Open Access Databases: Medicine and Health Sciences

A comprehensive gateway to reports, funding opportunities, consumer information, data, and statistics from the lead federal agency dedicated to health care quality and safety.

Information from the Federal government about HIV/AIDS prevention, testing, treatment, research, and using new media in response to HIV/AIDS.

AIDSinfo is a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) project providing information on HIV/AIDS clinical trials and treatment. It is the result of merging two previous DHHS projects: The AIDS Clinical Trials Information Service (ACTIS) and the HIV/AIDS Treatment Information Service (ATIS). It is a central resource for current information on federally and privately funded clinical trials for AIDS patients and others infected with HIV.

Provides access to some 35 peer-reviewed journals from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Venezuela and more in the areas of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development.

Provides access to some 35 peer-reviewed journals from Brazil, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe and more in the areas of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development.

Health and health-care related telephone survey data from racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse households. Includes AskCHIS, an online tool for searching and comparing health statistics by county, region or across California.
Note: Requires one-time, free registration

Provides a suite of data visualization tools based on current national estimates of the incidence, mortality, and prevalence of 27 cancer types in 184 countries, by sex and age group, collected as part of the GLOBOCAN project. Estimates are based on the most recent data available to IARC and on information publicly available online.

CDC links to vital statistics and records, "Health, United States," and other statistics by topic.

Provides access to a wide array of public health information including data on mortality, diseases, environmental and occupational health, and health practice and prevention.

The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) was established in January 1994, and aims to provide research-based information about the effects of interventions used in health and social care. Provides access to three databases: Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), NHS Economic Evaluation Database, and the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Database.

ClinicalTrials.gov offers up-to-date information for locating federally and privately supported clinical trials. The database currently contains nearly 100,000 trials in all 50 States and in 173 countries, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, other federal agencies, and private industry.

The County Health Rankings show the rank of the health of nearly every county in the nation and illustrate that much of what affects health occurs outside of the doctor’s office. The Rankings help counties understand what influences how healthy residents are and how long they will live. The Rankings look at a variety of measures that affect health such as the rate of people dying before age 75, high school graduation rates, unemployment, limited access to healthy foods, air and water quality, income, and rates of smoking, obesity and teen births. Based on data available for each county, the Rankings are unique in their ability to measure the overall health of each county in all 50 states on the many factors that influence health, and they have been used to garner support among government agencies, healthcare providers, community organizations, business leaders, policymakers, and the public for local health improvement initiatives.

Deep Blue is the University of Michigan's permanent, safe, and accessible service for representing our rich intellectual environment. The primary goal of Deep Blue is to provide access to the work that makes Michigan a leader in research, teaching, and creativity. By representing our scholars, from faculty through students, as individuals and as members of communities, Deep Blue provides a framework for preserving and finding the best scholarly and artistic work done at the University. The collection may be browsed by subject, title, author, and date.

The DHS Program website assists developing countries worldwide in the collection and use of data to monitor and evaluate population, health, and nutrition programs. Demographic and health surveys provide information on family planning, maternal and child health, child survival, HIV/AIDS/sexually transmitted infections, and reproductive health. Data is available using the STATcompiler, an online database tool that allows users to select numerous countries and hundreds of indicators to create customized tables that serve their specific data needs. In addition, DHS publications are available online, as are datasets.
Note: Registration required for datasets access, but the data is available at no cost.

Devices@FDA is a catalog of cleared and approved medical device information from the US Food & Drug Administration. It includes links to the device summary information, manufacturer, approval date, user instructions, and other consumer information. Devices@FDA searches PMN-510(k) Premarket Notification, PMA-Premarket Approval, and HDE-Humanitarian Device Exemption.

A collection of links to virtually all major data collection systems sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Disaster Lit: the Resource Guide for Disaster Medicine and Public Health is a database of links to disaster medicine and public health documents/grey literature freely available online. Documents include expert guidelines, research reports, conference proceedings, training classes, fact sheets, websites, databases, and similar materials selected from over 700 organizations for a professional audience. Materials selected are from non-commercial publishing sources and supplement disaster-related resources from PubMed (biomedical journal literature) and MedlinePlus (health information for the public). Disaster Lit includes records for surveys, interview scripts, and other tools recommended for use in data collection following a disaster.

The DPD contains product specific information on approximately 18,000 products drugs approved for use in Canada. The database is managed by Health Canada, the federal regulator of therapeutic products, and includes human pharmaceutical and biological drugs, veterinary drugs and disinfectant products.

Drugs@FDA allows you to search for official information about FDA-approved brand name and generic drugs and therapeutic biological products.

State legislation falling under six topics: asthma, children's environmental health, indoor air quality, pesticides, toxics and chemicals (including asbestos, lead, and mercury), and tracking, surveillance, and biomonitoring. All entries include brief summaries of current legislation as well as status and bill number.

UC's open access repository. Contains books, journals, working papers, conference publications, postprints, theses, and dissertations.

The world’s most comprehensive catalog of surveys, censuses, vital statistics, and other health-related data. Data may be browsed by country, organization, data type, keyword, survey family, series or systems. Data made available for download by IHME can be used, shared, modified, or built upon by non-commercial users via the Open Data Commons Attribution License.

GHO data repository provides access to over 50 datasets on priority health topics including mortality and burden of diseases, the Millennium Development Goals (child nutrition, child health, maternal and reproductive health, immunization, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, neglected diseases, water and sanitation), non communicable diseases and risk factors, epidemic-prone diseases, health systems, environmental health, violence and injuries, equity among others.

The Global Index Medicus (GIM) provides worldwide access to biomedical and public health literature produced by and within low-middle income countries. The main objective is to increase the visibility and usability of this important set of resources. The material is collated and aggregated by WHO Regional Office Libraries on a central search platform allowing retrieval of bibliographical and full text information.

The scope of the GTR includes the test's purpose, methodology, validity, evidence of the test's usefulness, and laboratory contacts and credentials. The overarching goal of the GTR is to advance the public health and research into the genetic basis of health and disease.

The Health and Environmental Research Online (HERO) database provides an easy way to view the scientific literature behind EPA science assessments. The database includes more than 300,000 scientific articles from the peer-reviewed literature used by EPA to develop its Integrated Science Assessments (ISA) that feed into the NAAQS review. It also includes references and data from the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a database that supports critical agency policymaking for chemical regulation.

Citations, some with abstracts or tables of contents, to literature on on Islamic medical and scientific ethics. Database covers attitudes and practices on ethical issues within the Muslim world, from many disciplines and publication types including journals, newspapers, books, bills, laws, court decisions, reports, and audiovisuals.

Largely focused on AIDS vaccine research, this collection spans 20 years and contains over seven thousand items including conference materials, meeting agendas and minutes, promotional materials, scientific reports and numerous government materials among other forms of documentation not found elsewhere in digital form.

A peer-reviewed and fully referenced database of drugs to which breastfeeding mothers may be exposed. Among the data included are maternal and infant levels of drugs, possible effects on breastfed infants and on lactation, and alternate drugs to consider.

Contains more than 14 million documents (80+ million pages) created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities. Offers integrated searching of tobacco industry documents from a variety of companies. The collections are comprised of tobacco industry documents from the late nineteenth century up through the present with the bulk of the collections dated 1950 through 2002. The Multimedia Collection includes information about more than 7,500 tobacco industry video and audio tapes related to advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research of tobacco products as well as materials gathered and produced by tobacco control advocates.

Consumer health information from the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, and other organizations.

medRxiv is a preprint service for medical, clinical, and health sciences.
Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, (DHHS) NCI was established by Congress in 1937. NCI's main responsibilities include coordinating the National Cancer Program; conducting and supporting cancer-related research; training physicians and scientists; and disseminating state-of-the-art information about cancer detection, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, control, palliative care, and survivorship.

Provides a range of photographs and illustrations that may help communicators of medical and public health convey meaning, describe concepts and tell stories. The collection spans everything from biomedical, science, and patient-care related illustrations and images to portraits of present and past directors and the staff of the National Cancer Institute. Currently provides public access to 3,085 images. Most of the images are in the public domain.

The home page for the National Center for Health Statistics includes the mission statement, news releases and fact sheets, publications, and links to CDC employment opportunities. It also includes links to a large collection of NCHS publications that provide detailed statistics on births, morbidity, mortality, and health status indicators for the population of the United States.

NICE Evidence search finds selected, authoritative evidence in health, social care and public health.

The mission of the Office of Minority Health (OMH) is to improve and protect the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will eliminate health disparities.

PolicyArchive is an innovative, new digital archive of global, non-partisan public policy research. It makes use of the power, efficiency, and economy of modern Internet technology to collect and disseminate summaries and full texts, videos, reports, briefs, and multimedia material of think tank, university, government, and foundation-funded policy research.

Intended for public health professionals, the media, laboratory scientists, educators, students, and the worldwide public to use in reference, teaching, presentation, and public health messages. The content is organized into hierarchical categories of people, places, and science, and is presented as single images, image sets, and multimedia files. Most of the material is in the public domain.

Statehealthfacts.org is a project of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and is designed to provide free, up-to-date, and easy-to-use health data on all 50 states. Statehealthfacts.org provides data on more than 500 health topics and is linked to both the Kaiser Family Foundation website (www.kff.org) and KaiserNetwork.org (www.kaisernetwork.org).

A cluster of databases covering toxicology, hazardous chemicals, environmental health and related areas. It is managed by the National Library of Medicine's Toxicology and Environmental Health Information Program (TEHIP). As part of a broader NLM reorganization, most of NLM's toxicology information services have been integrated into other NLM products and services.

Links to FDA information about the safety and availability of vaccines, with additional sections on counterterrorism and pandemics.

WHOSIS, the WHO Statistical Information System, is an interactive database bringing together core health statistics for the 193 WHO Member States. It comprises more than 70 indicators, which can be accessed by way of a quick search, by major categories, or through user-defined tables. The data can be further filtered, tabulated, charted and downloaded.

International index to African health literature and information sources.

Toxicological profiles covering the effects of hazardous substances, chemicals, and compounds. Contains more than 40,000 pages of data from the printed version, including information on mitigation of health effects, data gaps, and all available health data. By Congressional mandate, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) produces "toxicological profiles" for hazardous substances found at National Priorities List (NPL) sites.

Developed by Lane Medical Library, serves up images and diagrams exclusively from medical and scientific organizations. It groups the results based on the degree to which their republication is restricted. The tool is available to anyone with Internet access.

Collects NMR data from any experiment and captures assigned chemical shifts, coupling constants, and peak lists for a variety of macromolecules; contains derived annotations such as hydrogen exchange rates, pKa values, and relaxation parameters.

Human-curated, classification of the neuroimaging literature.

The Campbell Collaboration promotes positive social and economic change through the production and use of systematic reviews and other evidence synthesis for evidence-based policy and practice. It provides an online, peer-reviewed monograph series of systematic reviews, which follow structured guidelines and standards for summarizing the international research evidence on the effects of interventions in crime and justice, education, international development, and social welfare.

ClinicalTrials.gov offers up-to-date information for locating federally and privately supported clinical trials. The database currently contains nearly 100,000 trials in all 50 States and in 173 countries, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, other federal agencies, and private industry.

A searchable database of over 12,000 high-quality dermatology images.

Dermnet is the largest independent photo dermatology source dedicated to online medical education though articles, photos and video. Dermnet provides information on a wide variety of skin conditions through innovative media. Website contains over 23,000 images of skin disease. Images can be enlarged via a click and can be located by browsing image categories or by using a search engine. The images and videos are available without charge, and users can purchase and license high-resolution copies of images for publishing purposes.

UC's open access repository. Contains books, journals, working papers, conference publications, postprints, theses, and dissertations.

The objective of the website is to make information about culture, language, health, illness and community resources directly accessible to health care providers who see patients from different ethnic groups. EthnoMed was designed to be used in clinics by care providers in the few minutes before seeing a patient in clinic. EthnoMed is intended to be a community voice in the clinic, so user feedback is essential. Information is specific to groups in the Seattle area, but much of the cultural and health information is of interest and applicable in other geographic areas. Each cultural profile includes a description of the group's country of origin, language, interpersonal relations, and health/death issues.

Journal articles, book chapters, bills, laws, court decisions, reports, books, audiovisuals, and news articles relating to bioethics and professional ethics. From Georgetown University.

The Free Medical Journals Site was created to promote the free availability of full text medical journals on the Internet.

Information from textbooks, journal articles, and electronic databases such as NLM's Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB®) is classified and summarized to create the database. Some of Haz-Map's features include: text search capability, browsing by jobs, diseases, or agents, searching hazardous agents by adverse effects, searching diseases by jobs and findings, and automated searches of TOXNET.

The Clinical Trials Search Portal provides access to a central database containing the trial registration data sets provided by several registries. It also provides links to the full original records.

A peer-reviewed and fully referenced database of drugs to which breastfeeding mothers may be exposed. Among the data included are maternal and infant levels of drugs, possible effects on breastfed infants and on lactation, and alternate drugs to consider.

LiverTox® provides up-to-date, unbiased and easily accessed information on the diagnosis, cause, frequency, clinical patterns and management of liver injury attributable to prescription and nonprescription medications and selected herbal and dietary supplements. The LiverTox site is meant as a resource for both physicians and patients as well as for clinical academicians and researchers who specialize in idiosyncratic drug induced hepatotoxicity.

Consumer health information from the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, and other organizations.

MedPix® is a free open-access online database of medical images, teaching cases, and clinical topics, integrating images and textual metadata including over 12,000 patient case scenarios, 9,000 topics, and nearly 59,000 images.

medRxiv is a preprint service for medical, clinical, and health sciences.
Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

The mRCT searches for controlled trials across many databases, including ClinicalTrials.gov,the National Health Service in the UK, and the International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN) Register.

Publishes reports by the National Academy of Sciences on science and science policy. Topics include agriculture, biology, computers, energy, the environment, engineering, food, medicine and health, space, social sciences, transportation, and more.

The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, (DHHS) NCI was established by Congress in 1937. NCI's main responsibilities include coordinating the National Cancer Program; conducting and supporting cancer-related research; training physicians and scientists; and disseminating state-of-the-art information about cancer detection, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, control, palliative care, and survivorship.

Provides a range of photographs and illustrations that may help communicators of medical and public health convey meaning, describe concepts and tell stories. The collection spans everything from biomedical, science, and patient-care related illustrations and images to portraits of present and past directors and the staff of the National Cancer Institute. Currently provides public access to 3,085 images. Most of the images are in the public domain.

Searchable protein and nucleotide databases, "free" from NIH. Includes genetics information from Medline, GenBank, EMBL, DDBJ, PIR, SWISS-PROT, PRF, and PDB.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) conducts and supports research on brain and nervous system disorders. Created by the U.S. Congress in 1950, NINDS is one of the more than two dozen research institutes and centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The site is an archive of the PASCAL and FRANCIS bibliographic databases in exact, human and social sciences, produced by the Inist-CNRS from 1972 to 2015. It provides access to more than 20 millions references (articles, patents, maps, conferences, books, reports and thesis) in exact sciences and technology, in biological and medical sciences, in art, archaeology, economics, ethnology, geography, history of science and technology, literature, linguistics, administrative and legal sciences, education and religion sciences. Stopped in 2015, this archive does not report any new documentary resource.

PEDro is the Physiotherapy Evidence Database, a free database of over 47,000 randomised trials, systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines in physiotherapy. For each trial, review or guideline, PEDro provides the citation details, the abstract and a link to the full text, where possible. All trials on PEDro are independently assessed for quality. These quality ratings are used to quickly guide users to trials that are more likely to be valid and to contain sufficient information to guide clinical practice. PEDro is produced by the Institute for Musculoskeletal Health, School of Public Health at the University of Sydney and is hosted by Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA).

Translates common medical terms into plain language, using definitions that were created by the U.S. government. Work on the Plain Language Medical Dictionary was performed under a subcontract with the University of Illinois at Chicago, and made possible by a grant from the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

Provides open-access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journal articles and journals.

PubMed provides access to citations from biomedical literature. LinkOut provides access to full-text articles at journal Web sites and other related Web resources. PubMed also provides access and links to the other Entrez molecular biology resources.

PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection. Launched in February 2000, PMC was developed and is managed by NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

ScienceOpen is a discovery platform with interactive features for scholars to enhance their research in the open, make an impact, and receive credit for it.

The Arabic manuscripts collection of the Wellcome Library (London) comprises around 1000 manuscript books and fragments relating to the history of medicine. These manuscripts are part of the Wellcome Library's Asian Collection, which comprises some 12,000 manuscripts and 4,000 printed books in 43 different languages. The Islamic holdings include Arabic and Persian manuscripts and printed books, and a small collection of Ottoman manuscripts and Turkish books. The core of these collections relates to the great heritage of classical medicine, preserved, enlarged and commentated on throughout the Islamic world, stretching from Southern Spain to South and South-east Asia.

Dental Cosmos, a "Monthly Record of Dental Science," was the first enduring national journal for the American dental profession, and one of the most significant in the early history of American dentistry.

This collection of important and unusual dental publications is comprised of both books and journals. Titles included have been selected for reasons of historical interest, value to the profession, rarity, or a need for preservation of the physical items. Highlights of the collection include such titles as "A Practical Treatise on Operative Dentistry" by Jonathan Taft, the thesis of Sigurd Ramfjord, and the "Transactions of the American Dental Association." While much of the collection is available to the public, those portions restricted to UM campus-use are noted as such.

The Florence Nightingale Digitization Project is a collaborative effort to create a comprehensive database of digitized correspondence written by Florence Nightingale and held by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, the Florence Nightingale Museum in London, The Royal College of Nursing, and the Wellcome Library in London. This resource will be useful for those interested in history of nursing & military medicine, history of statistics, Victorian social history and of course Florence Nightingale’s life and work.

Images from the History of Medicine provides access to nearly 70,000 images in the collections of the U.S National Library of Medicine, illustrating the social and historical aspects of medicine from the Middle Ages to the present.

A collection of primary source documents, images, and narratives that detail the impact of the American influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 on 50 cities in the United States. Each city has its own essay in addition to supplementary materials: time line, images, and reference list. Four topic areas are covered: People, Places, Organizations, and Subjects.

The Medical Heritage Library is a digitized collection of rare books from leading medical libraries. The contents cover all areas in the history of medicine and can be browsed by title, author, subject/keyboard, and date. Contributors include the National Library of Medicine, the New York Public Library and the medical libraries of Columbia, Harvard, and Yale.

This unique site serves as a source of historical background information on issues regarding the nursing profession and the provision of nursing care. It addresses a wide range of topics critical to comprehending and broadening our understanding of health care and nursing concerns, including the role of professional nurses, nurse shortages, workplace problems and public health issues. It provides information on the historical context in which nursing developed as a profession and an occupation as well as the nursing profession’s contributions to health care in the United States.