Comparative Study of Five Health and Nursing Databases
Comparison Review by CCL-EAR Committee
The review focused on five healthcare and nursing databases: EBSCO CINAHL Complete, EBSCO CINAHL Plus with Full Text, Gale Nursing Resource Center AND Nursing + Allied Health (sold as a bundle), OVID Nursing Database, ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health Source.
The review focused on the subject coverage, search interface, cost, availability/accessibility of service, and customer service as well as customization, and mobile options.
If you have any experience with this product, please leave a comment and rate its appropriateness for use in a community college environment.
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For access contact Amy Beadle, Library Consortium Director, 916.800.2175.
Comments
My previous library was fortunate to have CINAHL Plus w FT, ProQuest and a modified version of Ovid's collection.
1) It's a shame that Ovid is so expensive, effectively pricing out many community colleges. I agree that their interface leaves a lot to be desired, but their content is rather good. (Indeed, it looks like Ovid is the only one of the reviewed databases with access to the paper cited in the review!)
2) We subscribed to ProQuest in large part because of AORN. In addition, I happen to like ProQuest's interface so that was a plus. On the other hand, of all our databases ProQuest gave our link resolver the most trouble.
3) All in all I agree with this review's conclusion that CINAHL Plus w FT is probably the best value for community college libraries. With that said, I find their full-text holdings a little lackluster and I worry EBSCO might become complacent keeping their title list up given CINAHLs reputation. More pressure from their competitors would benefit everyone, especially if Ovid truly tried to compete (cost-wise) in the community college market.
We have Ebsco Discovery Service. We did offer both CINAHL with Full Text and Medline with Full Text. Our Nursing Department prefers Medline for more scholarly articles for nursing, so we discontinued CINAHL. It would have been useful to have compared Medline with your other databases in this comparison.
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