50 Resources for Healthcare: 9. Search NHS-based journals via HDAS

HDAS is the Healthcare Databases Advanced Search facility offered by NHS Evidence. It is available to users with an NHS Athens username and password. You can search a number of different databases using the same interface.

The databases available include:

** AMED, BNI, Cinahl, Embase, Health Business Elite, HMIC, Medline and Psychinfo **

The benefits of using HDAS include:

• Number of different databases available
• You can search for articles across a wide range of journal titles
• Common search interface for different databases – you don’t have to learn how to use each database separately
• You can search using keywords – just enter your terms into the search box
• You can search using a thesaurus – find the right thesaurus terms to speed up your search
• You can view your search history
• You can combine searches together using AND or OR – to either focus or expand your search
• You are offered a number of limits to apply to your search to help you to focus on a topic; including date range, patient age group, patient gender, publication type and others
• You can link through to the full-text of online journal articles that we subscribe to
• You can set up alerts so that you are informed when new content is added that matches your search criteria
• You can save your results or email them to a colleague

You can access all the NHS Evidence tools from our Healthcare Resources page .

We have a number of online guides to help you to get started or you can sign-up to our literature searching training course which will help you to develop the right skills to use databases to perform a literature search.