Pharmaceutical Connect > Links to Find Medical Information > Clinical Literature
| Clinical Trials | Literature Database |
ClinicalTrials.gov
ClinicalTrials.gov is a service of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It offers information on federally and privately supported clinical trials. ClinicalTrials.gov currently contains approximately 12,000 clinical studies sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, other federal agencies, and private industry.
ClinicalStudyResults
ClinicalStudyResults is a repository for clinical study results from all "hypothesis-testing" clinical studies (mainly phase III and IV studies) completed since October 1, 2002 for drug products that are approved in the United States. This includes both published articles and unpublished study summaries. PhRMA, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, will initially establish the electronic database to ensure that it is fully operational as of October 1, 2004. PhRMA hopes that database administration will eventually be transferred to an independent third party.
A note about PhRMA: PhRMA represents leading research-based pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in the United States. Its mission is to conduct effective advocacy for public policies that encourage discovery of important new medicines for patients by pharmaceutical/biotechnology research companies.
PubMed
PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from Medline and additional life science journals. Medline is produced by the National Library of Medicine and includes records from three different printed sources: Index Medicus, Index Dental Literature, and International Nursing Index. Medline indexes articles from more than 4,500-4,600 journals published in over 70 countries.
PubMed can be searched using free text terms. A more refined search can be conducted using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) controlled vocabulary. MeSH is NLM's controlled vocabulary used for indexing articles for Medline/PubMed. MeSH is organized in a tree structure, with broad terms containing narrower terms. Searching for a term in the MeSH browser will result in a list of possible headings related to the term you entered. When you select and click on the appropriate heading, it brings you to a page that outlines the MeSH heading's tree number (numerical placement of the heading in the MeSH tree), scope notes, entry terms, see references, among others. It also displays the tree where your MeSH heading resides - this is extremely helpful, as you can see the broader and narrower terms of your heading, and it might lead to expanding or refining your search. An example of a broad term in MeSH is Neoplasms. A narrower term in this tree would be Acanthoma, a type of skin neoplasm.
PubMed also includes In-Process records, which are those that have not yet been indexed by the NLM's indexing team. Use free text terms to include In-Process records in the search. Because the In-Process records are not yet indexed with MeSH, using MeSH terms only in the search will not retrieve In-Process records.
Additional PubMed resources: