Getting the Most from NNLM: Public Health Part 2

Posted by Sarah Levin-Lederer on February 14th, 2020 Posted in: NLM Resources, Public Health
Tags: Emergency Preparedness (EPP), professional development, Public Health, resources

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Back in November, I wrote about databases, resources and services from NLM and NNLM that are useful for our public health partners beyond MedlinePlus and PubMed.  In that post, I covered the databases that had a broad appeal to a public health audience or that had public health information for a general audience including resources with information on HIV/AIDS, disaster preparedness, response and recovery, environmental health and more.

Public health can be siloed and territorial due to limited funding and other resources, but it’s important to know what research and programs already exist, so that programs and projects continue to advance community health and build on best practices. NLM has databases that can help public health professionals, and social and behavioral health researchers find information that hasn’t been commercially published, including about ongoing and completed research and projects.

National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR ONESearch) allows public health professionals, researchers and the interested public the ability to search multiple databases for information on archived, completed and ongoing social and behavioral intervention research. Results can be filtered by Project Status, Performing Organization, Funding Organization, Initial and Final Year, State and more. NICHSR ONESearch also has datasets and methodologies.

ClinicalTrails.gov allows patients and families, researchers, and study managers to search for ongoing clinical trials and filter results by recruitment status, age or age group, sex, study type, results, funder type and more.

Disaster Lit is a resource within the NLM’s wider emergency preparedness, response and recovery database, Disaster Information Management Research Center (DIMRC), and gives researchers, professionals and the public access to gray literature including conference proceedings, white papers and policy papers, videos, clinical guidance and more.  Disaster Lit includes pre-done searches on select topics and the ability to build searches to find the emergency preparedness, response and recovery information most relevant to your planning and response situation.

Doing research and building searches that produce relevant results are skills that need to be learned and practiced.  Getting the most from PubMed and other databases can be learned.  Use the PubMed Search Builder Tutorial to learn more. You can also learn to build searches in Disaster Lit with the How to Search Tutorial.

Reminder that NNLM also has classes for public health professionals. You can search the full NNLM class catalog or find NNLM webinars that are CHES eligible.

Upcoming CHES eligible classes:

February 26, 2020 from 2-3pm (ET)-From Problem to Prevention: Evidence-Based Public Health

March 5, 2020 from 2-3pm (ET)-Health Statistics on the Web

You can also filter classes using the keywords “public health” to find classes that have been designated useful for a public health audience.