(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).

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 Most...are taken from bibliographic databases (mainly PubMed and Embase), but also...other published and unpublished sources, including CINAHL, ClinicalTrials.gov and the WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform"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

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*

• 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.

The Citing Sources guide includes AMA 11th edition, which is online.

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. Something similar is 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.

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.

• 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 the FAQ and a glossary of terms

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

Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) -- This EPA database gives information about the health hazards of chemicals found in the environment. "Each IRIS assessment can cover a chemical, a group of related chemicals, or a complex mixture." It includes oral reference dose (RfD) and other toxicity values.

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.

National Pesticide Information Center -- All of its data comes from the EPA, but the information is gathered together and also written for consumers. (For any other chemical information, please also check our guide for Chemistry, specifically the resources listed under Chemical Properties.)

NeoFax (click on NeoFax tab under MicroMedex) -- "helps clinicians accurately prescribe, calculate, formulate, and administer essential drugs and parenteral nutrition solutions for infants. By providing complete neonatal drug information covering more than 180 substances, NeoFax helps reduce medication errors and decreases time spent ordering and compounding."

PDR.net (Physician's Desk Reference) -- The Drug Information page includes a lot of information, including mechanisms of action, pharmacokinetics, 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.

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... 

dbGaP (Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes [NCBI]) -- "...developed to archive and distribute the data and results from studies that have investigated the interaction of genotype and phenotype in Humans."

Genes Expression Omnibus (GEO) -- "...public functional genomics data repository supporting MIAME-compliant data submissions. Array- and sequence-based data are accepted. Tools are provided to help users query and download experiments and curated gene expression profiles."

Human Reference Interactome Mapping Project (HuRI) -- "Pairwise combinations of human protein-coding genes are tested systematically using high throughput yeast two-hybrid screens to detect protein-protein interactions. The quality of these interactions is further validated in multiple orthogonal assays. ...In addition to systematically identifying PPIs experimentally, this web portal also includes PPIs of comparable high quality extracted from literature."

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

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.

OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) -- A "catalog of human genes and genetic conditions."

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."

Dynamedex -- EBMcalc medical calculator

IBM Micromedex  -- Includes Frequent Use calculations, Unit and Dose Converters, and By Specialty

UpToDate -- By specialty or alphabetically

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

AccessMedicine VIDEOS

• AccessMedicine --> Videos --> Pharmacology
• These are mostly animations that 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

DailyMed -- This NLM database is the "provides the most recent labeling submitted to the FDA by companies and currently in use (i.e., "in use" labeling). DailyMed contains labeling for prescription and nonprescription drugs for human and animal use, and for additional products such as medical gases, devices, cosmetics, dietary supplements, and medical foods."

• Note the tab for "Human Drugs" at the top

Drugs@FDA -- This site is for FDA-approved drugs.

• 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 the FAQ and a glossary of terms

DynaMedex -- "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. Here are the explanations of "drug review," "drug monograph," and others.

Goodman and Gilman's Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (2022; 14th 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

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." Includes molecule metabolisms and pathways.

MicroMedex  -- 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. Most of the drug records themselves also have mechanisms of action.

PDR.net (Physician's Desk Reference) -- The Drug Information page includes a lot of information, including mechanisms of action, pharmacokinetics, 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. The "supplementary" headings are marked.

• Use THIS address for PubMed, because it includes links to our full text

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

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.

• Do not use SEARCH in the upper right corner; that is for all of the FDA; instead, scroll down to "Navigate"
• The "Orange Book" is a list of approved generic drugs; the page is searchable by active ingredient and has an FAQ

Go to the Molecular Biology, Methods, and Protocols page of the Biological Sciences guide.

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

PubMed and EMBASE -- For articles