EMBASE (Excerpta Medica) database is a major biomedical and pharmaceutical containing more than 9 million records from 1974 to the present from over 4,000 journals; approximately 450,000 records are added annually. More than 80 percent of recent records contain full author abstracts. This bibliographic database indexes international journals in the following fields: drug research, pharmacology, pharmaceutics, toxicology, clinical and experimental human medicine, health policy and management, public health, occupational health, environmental health, drug dependence and abuse, psychiatry, forensic medicine, and biomedical engineering/instrumentation. EMBASE is produced by Elsevier Science.
LexisNexis provides access to full-text information from more than 5,600 sources, including national and regional newspapers, wire services, broadcast transcripts, international news, and non-English-language sources; U.S. federal and state case law, codes, regulations, legal news, law reviews, and international legal information; and business news journals, company financial information, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reports, and industry and market news. It is produced by Reed Elsevier, Inc.
MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s premier bibliographic database, containing citations from the mid-1960s to the present and covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. PubMed provides online access to more than 12 million MEDLINE citations. MEDLINE contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 4,600 biomedical journals published in the United States and 70 other countries. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full-text articles and other related resources. This database can be accessed at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed.
Sociological Abstracts. This online search was carried out throughout the entire course of the study.
To begin the process of identifying peer-reviewed literature, the IOM staff conducted a general bibliographic search on topics that were relevant to interactions among genes and the social environment, and behavioral and physiological factors. IOM staff then categorized these references according to their subject matter and developed reference lists of key citations that were provided to the committee for review. After discussing the reference lists with the committee, areas in which additional information was needed were determined.
As the study progressed, searches of peer-reviewed literature continued regularly. Additional references were identified by reviewing the reference lists of major primary literature, key reports, relevant websites, and text-