(Scroll down to next box for SPECIALIZED RESOURCES)

Online medical textbooks:

• AccessEmergencyMedicine
• AccessMedicine
• AccessPediatrics
• AccessSurgery

There is a lot of overlap, so don't stress about which one to choose -- start with AccessMedicine, which includes several excellent pharma texts (such as Goodman and Gilman's Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics).

Online handbooks and encyclopedias -- From 2017+, with the word "drugs" in the TITLE

Journal articles and studies about drugs and their effects are found mostly in databases.
 

• EMBASE and PubMed have links to articles and some other kinds of information
   
• Cochrane Library has reviews and protocols which "answer a specific research question," and "reports of randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials. Most...are taken from bibliographic databases (mainly PubMed and Embase), but also...other published and unpublished sources, including CINAHL, ClinicalTrials.gov and the WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform"

Drug Information (from  Medlineplus.gov) -- Information about thousands of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, herbs, and supplements, collected from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) and the United States Pharmacopeia (USP).

Drug Therapy (from MedlinePlus.gov) -- Explanations of topics such as antidepressants, blood thinners, chemotherapy, over-the-counter medicines, pain relievers, diabetes medicines, medication errors, and more.

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) -- This site's mission is to give information about "the usefulness and safety of complementary and integrative interventions and to provide the public with research-based information to guide health-care decision making." The NCCIH is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH; in 2014, NCCIH's name was changed from National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine). 

Business Source Ultimate -- This database includes many publications about the pharmaceutical industry

Dictionary of Pharmaceutical Medicine (2017, 4th ed.) -- This edition...focus[es] on the research and development of new therapies as well as on conducting clinical trials, marketing authorizations for new medicinal products, and safety aspects including pharmacovigilance. ...[T]his new book explains roughly 1,000 abbreviations most commonly used in pharmaceutical medicine. This volume will be a valuable tool for professionals working in the pharmaceutical industry, medical and pre-clinical research, regulatory affairs, marketing and marketing authorization of pharmaceuticals."

Cortellis -- Includes information about clinical trials, companies, deals, and other kinds of business and scientific information. "Tracks over 60,000 individual drugs throughout their development cycle."

• It will ask you to sign in using your JHED ID
• Pages 2-4 of this quick-start guide show its features

DrugBank -- Information about drugs and their targets; e.g., this record for bevacizumab. It also includes pricing information.

Markets and Reimbursements

• Engineering Guide --> BME and Design Teams --> Markets and Reimbursements
• Business Guide --> Industry Overviews and Reports --> There are some good databases there, and you can search for the Pharmaceuticals industry, or drug names or categories
• Health Care Reimbursement Guide

PubChem -- This database is linked with PubMed and other NCBI databases, such as the protein 3D structure database.

• You can search it by descriptive terms, chemical properties, or structural similarity
• PubChem contains information from pharmaceutical companies themselves -- from a structure, you can link out to PubMed for articles about researchers who are working on them

STAT Plus -- Detailed coverage and analysis of biotech and healthtech, pharma, policy, and life sciences. 

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) -- News and information about drug labeling, drug approvals, and much more.

Always cite your sources *completely* and *correctly*.

Here is the Citing Sources guide, including AMA 11th edition.

---------------------------------------------------
Articles, conference papers, etc. -- Your citation manager (e.g., Refworks, EndNote, Mendeley, EasyBib, Zotero) will put it into whatever style your professor requires

Datasets - Here's MIT's quick guidelines for citing data (some datasets will list their own suggestion for citing; when they do, use that)

MeSH definitions -- None of the styles has an entry for citing MeSH definitions. Therefore, choose something that's similar. MeSH is sort of like an online encyclopedia or dictionary, so use that as your model. EXAMPLE:  APA cites an encyclopedia entry this way::

• Feminism. (n.d.). In Encyclopædia Britannica online. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/724633/feminism
• Therefore, your MeSH heading citation would be:
  Adjuvants, Pharmaceutic. (n.d.). In PubMed, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/68000277.

Websites (AMA style)

When in doubt, err on the side of including as much information as you can, so that other researchers, professors, and employers can find your sources.

AccessMedicine -- A database of online medical textbooks.

• To narrow down your results, choose NARROW BY TOPIC on the right

ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry)

• Toxicological profiles include health effects, routes of exposure, chemical and physical properties, mechanisms of action, toxicokinetics, interaction profiles, regulations, and more

Drugs@FDA -- This site is for FDA-approved drugs. Here is the FAQ.

• Search by drug name, active ingredient, or application number
• OR, search the entire FDA site for what you want; e.g., bevacizumab dosing
• Narrow your results using the limits on the left
• Here is help with using the site  and a glossary of terms

Dynamed and Micromedex with Watson

Environmental Health & Toxicology -- This is NIH's site for toxicology and environmental health. It includes many databases, including

• Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB) -- Information about human health effects, environmental fate, and other characteristics of dangerous chemicals
• Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) -- This EPA database, which NIH lists on its toxicology platform, gives information about the health hazards of chemicals found in the environment. It includes oral reference dose (RfD) and other toxicity values.
• TOXLINE -- These are articles about "biochemical, pharmacological, physiological, and toxicological effects of drugs and other chemicals

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Safer Chemicals Research -- This group supplies information about real-world exposures so that they can be more fully examined, evaluates the potential environmental and health impacts of new materials and chemicals, and publishes material to educate the public.

Gene Ontology Consortium --  This is a framework for describing gene products in a consistent manner, no matter the species. These cover

• "Cellular Component -- "the parts of a cell or its extracellular environment"
• Molecular Function -- the elemental activities of a gene product at the molecular level, such as binding or catalysis
• Biological Process -- operations or sets of molecular events with a defined beginning and end, pertinent to the functioning of integrated living units: cells, tissues, organs, and organisms"

Hazardous Substances Databank (HSDB) -- Information about "toxicology of potentially hazardous chemicals. It provides information on human exposure, industrial hygiene, emergency handling procedures, environmental fate, regulatory requirements, nanomaterials, and related areas." As of 2019, HSDB is located in PubChem. Here is help for you, including how to find ONLY information from HSDB (scroll down). HSDB contains peer-reviewed data for 5,000+ chemicals, including information about

• human health effects
• animal toxicity studies
• metabolism pharmacokinetics
• pharmacology
• environmental fate/exposure
• standards & regulations
• chem/physical properties
• manufacturing information

IBM Micromedex  -- This database has tons of drug information. When it's not clear what to do, click HELP (upper right corner) and it will give you help for the section you're in. This quick reference sheet is also helpful, as is the "Drug Comparison" section -- add at least two drugs, and all characteristics of each one will be shown, including adverse effects.

• ("Other Tools" = Calculators, and Tox and Drug Product Lookup)

MedlinePlus.gov -- General background written for laypeople.

MedWatch (FDA Safety Info and AE Reporting System) -- This site also has medication guides to many drugs, which include adverse effects.

PDR.net (Physician's Desk Reference) -- The DRUG INFORMATION page provides a lot of information, including PK and dosing considerations:

SIDER (Side Effect Resource) -- The collected *public* information about *marketed* medicines. You can search by drug name, ATC code, or side effect.

UpToDate

• ("Contents" = What's New, Practice Changing Updates, Drug Information, Patient Eduation, Topics by Specialty, Authors and Editors)

ArrayExpress -- From European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The database contains "data from high-throughput functional genomics experiments." Here's the record for bevacizumab.

Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS) --  This is a public database (from the National Institute of Environmental and Health Sciences [NIEHS]. Its toxicogenomics data include "clinical chemistry and histopathology findings, and microarray and proteomics data." It allows you to query the data, and then go to the microarray module to do analyses on gene signatures and pathways.

• You must download the data
• Here is more information (as of 2013) about CEBS and related work
• Here is how to cite CEBS data 

Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) -- CTD has information about "relationships between chemicals, genes, and human diseases," with its main focus on the effects of environmental chemicals on human health. Here's the FAQ.

Connectivity Map (MIT) -- This work "links gene patterns associated with disease to corresponding patterns produced by drug candidates... It allows researchers to screen compounds against genomewide disease signatures... 

• Requires free registration
• As soon as you register, you'll see a tutorial, because you need a gene expression signature to use the map

dbGaP (Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes [NCBI]) -- As of 2013, this database included "results of studies that have investigated the interaction of genotype and phenotype," incuding

• genome-wide association studies
• medical sequencing
• molecular diagnostic assays
• association between genotype and non-clinical traits

Types of data distributed through dbGaP include

• phenotype data
• association (GWAS) data
• summary level analysis data
• SRA (Short Read Archive) data
• reference alignment (BAM) data
• VCF (Variant Call Format) data
• expression data
• imputed genotype data,
• image data

Genes Expression Omnibus (GEO) -- Contains "microarray, next-generation sequencing, and other forms of high-throughput functional genomics data submitted by the research community."

Human Reference Interactome Mapping Project (HuRI) -- This project's goal is to develop a "reference map of the human protein-protein interactome network." An "interactome" is "the complete collection of all physical protein–protein interactions that can take place within a cell." [M. Cusick et al., Interactome: gateway into systems biology. Hum Mol Genet 2005, 14 (suppl_2): R171-R181]. Here is detailed information about this project.

International HapMap Project -- "haplotype map of the human genome, the HapMap, which will describe the common patterns of human DNA sequence variation." This project was ended in June 2016.

KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) -- A source for "understanding high-level functions and utilities of the biological system, such as the cell, the organism and the ecosystem, from genomic and molecular-level information." It also includes information about drugs and diseases, as well as these other search networks:

• DBGET -- This is a "retrieval system for major biological databases," including PubMed
• GenomeNet -- This is a "Japanese network of database and computational services for genome research and related research areas in biomedical sciences, operated by the Kyoto University Bioinformatics Center."
• varDB and ClinVar

OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) -- A "catalog of human genes and genetic conditions." Here's a tutorial (5.5 minutes).

Pharmacogenomics KnowledgeBase (PharmaGKB) -- Information about the "impact of human variation on drug responses."

Reactome -- This database shows physiological pathways for humans and other creatures, such as those for signal transduction, cell-to-cell communication, metabolism of proteins, and the immune system. It offers "bioinformatics tools for the visualization, interpretation and analysis of pathway knowledge to support basic research, genome analysis, modeling, systems biology and education."

The Welch Library site about bioinformatics resources includes portals to bioinformatics tools, databases, software, and topics -- look at tabs across the top, which include pharmacogenomics/pharmacology.

Dynamed and Micromedex with Watson

• Includes calculators for "medical equations, clinical criteria, decision trees, statistics calculators, and units and dose converters, plus a list of abbreviations"

EBMcalc

• converters (e.g., energy unit, force unit, flow unit, opioid dose converters)
• equations (e.g., BMI, digitalis body load, IV drip maintenance rate calculator, oxygen content of arterial and venous blood)
• clinical criteria (e.g., bleeding risk on Warfarin therapy; lots of indexes for probability, risk, and severity)

IBM Micromedex  -- This database has tons of drug information. When it's not clear what to do, click HELP (upper right corner) and it will give you help for the section you're in. This quick reference sheet is also helpful, as is the "Drug Comparison" section -- add at least two drugs, and all characteristics of each one will be shown, including adverse effects.

• ("Other Tools" = Calculators, and Tox and Drug Product Lookup)

Physician's Desk Reference (PDR)

UpToDate

• ("Contents" = What's New, Practice Changing Updates, Drug Information, Patient Eduation, Topics by Specialty, Authors and Editors)

AccessMedicine VIDEOS

• AccessMedicine --> Videos --> Pharmacology
• There are 10 videos about the cardiovascular system, and 4 about neurologic aspects
• The videos show mechanisms of action and other effects of drugs

ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry)

• Toxicological profiles include health effects, routes of exposure, chemical and physical properties, mechanisms of action, toxicokinetics, interaction profiles, regulations, and more

DrugBank -- Contains information about drugs and their targets. For example, here is the record for bevacizumab. It also includes pricing information.

Drugs@FDA -- This site is for FDA-approved drugs. Here is the FAQ.

• Search by drug name, active ingredient, or application number
• OR, search the entire FDA site for what you want; e.g., bevacizumab dosing
• Narrow your results using the limits on the left

DynaMed and Micromedex -- "Clinical information resource used by physicians to answer clinical questions quickly at the point of care."

• Enter a drug name in the search box and you'll get several kinds of results. A "drug review" is "focus on drugs or drug classes that is not specific to...a single disease or condition. Includes efficacy, ...adverse effects, and inappropriate prescribing criteria for older adults. The content is organized to support learning about the drug/drug class."
• Includes calculators for "medical equations, clinical criteria, decision trees, statistics calculators, and units and dose converters, plus a list of abbreviations"
• Here's the record for bevacizumab (note the asterisk, to get all the word endings)
  
  

Goodman and Gilman's Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (2011; 12 ed.) -- How drugs actually work in the body, including how and why drugs affect different body systems, chemical properties of drugs, drug interactions, and toxic effects.

Hazardous Substances Databank (HSDB) -- Information about "toxicology of potentially hazardous chemicals. It provides information on human exposure, industrial hygiene, emergency handling procedures, environmental fate, regulatory requirements, nanomaterials, and related areas."

--- As of 2019, HSDB is located in PubChem. Here is help for you, including how to find ONLY information from HSDB (scroll down). HSDB contains peer-reviewed data for 5,000+ chemicals, including information about

• human health effects
• animal toxicity studies
• metabolism pharmacokinetics
• pharmacology
• environmental fate/exposure
• standards & regulations
• chem/physical properties
• manufacturing information

Henry Stewart Talks: Biomedical and Life Sciences Collection

• Videos about biomedical topics, including Pharmaceutical Sciences -- you can choose your subtopic and arrange by date, such as these talks about bioavailability (use the search box)

KEGG Drug Database -- This piece of KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) covers "approved drugs in Japan, USA, and Europe unified based on the chemical structure and/or the chemical component, and associated with therapeutic target, metabolizing enzyme, and other molecular interaction network information. KEGG DRUG contains links to the drug labels (package inserts) of all the marketed drugs in Japan and USA according to their active ingredients." Scroll down to see what's included.

MicroMedex Healthcare Series  -- The mechanisms of action are in many places. You can type in the drug name plus the word "mechanism, or use "help," or use the "Drug Comparison" section -- add at least two drugs, and all characteristics of each one will be shown, including adverse effects.

Here's another place to find mechanisms of action, in a drug record:

PDR.net (Physician's Desk Reference) -- The DRUG INFORMATION page provides a lot of information, including PK and dosing considerations:

PubChem -- This database is linked with PubMed and other NCBI databases, such as the protein 3D structure database.

• You can search it by descriptive terms, chemical properties, or structural similarity
• PubChem contains information from pharmaceutical companies themselves -- from a structure, you can link out to PubMed for articles about researchers who are working on them

PubMed Supplementary Concepts -- MeSH headings in PubMed include "supplementary concepts," which are substance names that are NOT included as main MeSH headings.

• For example, putting the word "hydrochloric" into MeSH retrieves 15+ headings
• The first 12 are main headings, but the last few are things like "aqua regia" and "Super Etch," which are just names in the literature but not *main* MeSH headings
• Use THIS address for PubMed, because it includes links to our full text

Reaxys -- Chemical compounds, reactions, properties, substance data, and patents. (Reaxys replaces Beilstein and Gmelin.)

• To find bioactivity, choose "Substances" and enter a chemical name, then "Search Substances" (bottom right)
• You'll get the number of substances that includes that chemical name, and on the left, lots of ways to filter your search
• Choose Bioactivity --> Pharmacological Data --> LIMIT TO
• Includes link to full-text articles

SciFinder Scholar -- You must register to use SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts online), which covers ~52 million compounds in  "journals, patents, conference proceedings, dissertations, technical reports, books, and more."

SpringerMaterials -- Chemical and physical properties of  materials and of chemical systems.

• Search by element or by structure
• "Data sources currently include the Landolt-Börnstein New Series, the Linus Pauling Files, and specialized databases on thermophysical properties, polymer thermodynamics, adsorption isotherms, and 32,000+ substance profiles"

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) -- News and information about drug labeling, drug approvals, and much more.

• The "Orange Book" is a list of approved generic drugs; the page is searchable by active ingredient and has an FAQ

This page about tools in molecular biology includes info about

• bacteria and prokaryotes
• genes
• proteins
   
• methods and protocols, including
• --- pharmacology and drug discovery (Wiley Current Protocols)
• --- pharmacology/toxicology (Springer Protocols)
• --- Look at the entire protocol list!

DailyMed -- This NLM database is the "official provider of FDA label information (package inserts)." Note the tab for "Human Drugs" at the top. Here's the record for bevacizumab; the PK information is under "Clinical Pharmacology."

DynaMed and Micromedex -- "Clinical information resource used by physicians to answer clinical questions quickly at the point of care."

• Enter a drug name in the search box and you'll get several kinds of results. A "drug review" is "focus on drugs or drug classes that is not specific to...a single disease or condition. Includes efficacy, ...adverse effects, and inappropriate prescribing criteria for older adults. The content is organized to support learning about the drug/drug class."
• Includes calculators for "medical equations, clinical criteria, decision trees, statistics calculators, and units and dose converters, plus a list of abbreviations"
• Here's the record for bevacizumab (note the asterisk, to get all the word endings)

Hazardous Substances Databank (HSDB) -- Information about "toxicology of potentially hazardous chemicals. It provides information on human exposure, industrial hygiene, emergency handling procedures, environmental fate, regulatory requirements, nanomaterials, and related areas."

--- As of 2019, HSDB is located in PubChem. Here is help for you, including how to find ONLY information from HSDB (scroll down). HSDB had peer-reviewed data for 5,000+ chemicals, including information about

• human health effects
• animal toxicity studies
• metabolism pharmacokinetics
• pharmacology
• environmental fate/exposure
• standards & regulations
• chem/physical properties
• manufacturing information

MicroMedex Healthcare Series  -- PK's can be found in the individual drug records. You can type in the drug name plus the word "pharmacokinetics," or use "help." An example is below. For PD, the easiest approach is to type in the drug name plus the word "pharmacodynamics." The first image is where HELP is, and the second is where PK is.

PDR.net (Physician's Desk Reference) -- The DRUG INFORMATION page provides a lot of information, including PK and dosing considerations:

ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry)

• This CDC site has toxicological profiles include health effects, routes of exposure, chemical and physical properties, mechanisms of action, toxicokinetics, interaction profiles, regulations, and more

Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS, from NIEHS) -- These are studies on the effects of chemicals on human and animal organs and organ systems.

Dynamed and Micromedex with Watson

Environmental Health & Toxicology -- This is NIH's site for toxicology and environmental health. It includes many databases, including

• Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB) -- Information about human health effects, environmental fate, and other characteristics of dangerous chemicals
• Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) -- This EPA database, which NIH lists on its toxicology platform, gives information about the health hazards of chemicals found in the environment. It includes oral reference dose (RfD) and other toxicity values.
• TOXLINE -- These are articles about "biochemical, pharmacological, physiological, and toxicological effects of drugs and other chemicals

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Safer Chemicals Research -- This group supplies information about real-world exposures so that they can be more fully examined, evaluates the potential environmental and health impacts of new materials and chemicals, and publishes material to educate the public.

Hazardous Substances Databank (HSDB) -- Information about "toxicology of potentially hazardous chemicals. It provides information on human exposure, industrial hygiene, emergency handling procedures, environmental fate, regulatory requirements, nanomaterials, and related areas."

--- As of 2019, HSDB is located in PubChem. Here is help for you, including how to find ONLY information from HSDB (scroll down). HSDB contains peer-reviewed data for 5,000+ chemicals, including information about

• human health effects
• animal toxicity studies
• metabolism pharmacokinetics
• pharmacology
• environmental fate/exposure
• standards & regulations
• chem/physical properties
• manufacturing information

IBM Micromedex  -- This database has tons of drug information. When it's not clear what to do, click HELP (upper right corner) and it will give you help for the section you're in. This quick reference sheet is also helpful, as is the "Drug Comparison" section -- add at least two drugs, and all characteristics of each one will be shown, including adverse effects.

• ("Other Tools" = Calculators, and Tox and Drug Product Lookup)

National Pesticide Information Center -- All of its data comes from the EPA, but the information is gathered together and also written for consumers.

UpToDate

• ("Contents" = What's New, Practice Changing Updates, Drug Information, Patient Eduation, Topics by Specialty, Authors and Editors)

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For any other chemical information, please also check our guide for Chemistry, specifically the resources listed under Chemical Properties.

Cochrane Library -- Reviews of various treatments and therapies for medical conditions, and conclusions about the comparative effectiveness

PubMed and EMBASE -- For articles