Subject and Course Guides: Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences Research Guide: Find Articles

Searching CAB Abstracts & PubMed

CAB Abstracts
PubMed

CAB Abstracts is the most comprehensive database for veterinary medicine, animal science, and agriculture. CAB Abstracts indexes many U.S. and international publications, conference proceedings, and book chapters. The coverage is from 1910 to the present.

Quick Tips

Can use Boolean operators: and, or, not. For example, (cats or dogs) and diabetes (Note: The Boolean operators do not need to be capitalized.)
Use quotation marks if you're searching for an exact phrase, "animal behaviour".
Sometimes it can be helpful to truncate a search term. Use the asterisk. For example, cataract* will retrieve records with the following words:
- cataracts
- cataractogenesis
- cataractous
Because CAB Abstracts is produced in the UK, include British and American spellings (e.g. leukaemia, odour, oestrogens, haematology).
After you've done a search, you might choose to "refine" or "limit" your search (e.g. English-only articles). The "refinements" are on the left-hand side of the results screen.
Pay attention to the descriptors that are found in the citation record. Use the descriptors as search terms.

PubMed indexes the health sciences/life sciences literature. It also indexes approximately 101 veterinary medicine journals. The coverage is from the 1950s to the present.

Remember, PubMed does NOT index EVERY journal important to veterinary medicine. For example, Applied Animal Behavior Science, Bovine Practitioner, The Pig Journal, & the Journal of Swine Health & Production are NOT indexed by PubMed.

Quick Tips

Link to PubMed via the library website for linkage to full-text via the WebBridge button.
Capitalize Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT).
Use "Limits" if appropriate (e.g. timeframe, language, etc.).
Remember to identify synonyms for the concepts in your search statement. You may use abbreviations and complete disease names as search terms. For example, (RSV OR respiratory syncytial virus) AND (sheep OR lambs).

Demo: Using Boolean operators

Online Indexes/ Databases

CONSULTANT
Covers 7,000 diseases of 8 species. Avian is the only exotic covered. Provided by the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.

CABI: CAB Abstracts and Global Health, 1910- (Web of Science) This link opens in a new window
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Journals, ebooks, conference proceedings, and reports on the applied life sciences, agriculture, environment, veterinary sciences, applied economics, food science, and nutrition. (Index)
PubMed Central This link opens in a new window
Provides access to human and veterinary medicine journals and many other life sciences journals.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
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Index to scholarly journals, books, conference proceedings, and patent records covering the fields of science, mathematics, engineering, technology, health and medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities. (Index)
Web of Science Core Collection, 1900- This link opens in a new window
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Why search? Find out how many times articles have been cited. Consists of 5 searchable databases: Science Citation Index Expanded (1900-present), indexing 5,300 major journals across 164 scientific disciplines; Social Sciences Citation Index (1900-present); Arts and Humanities Citation Index (1975-present); Book Citation Index-Science (2005-present); Book Citation Index-Social Sciences & Humanities (2005-present)

Additional Resources

Animal Welfare Information Center
The Animal Welfare Information Center (AWIC) is mandated by the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) to provide information for improved animal care and use in research, testing, teaching, and exhibition.

AGRICOLA (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
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Indexes books, articles, and other publications that cover all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines, including food and human nutrition, agricultural engineering and technology, and earth and environmental sciences. (Index and Abstracts)
BIOSIS Citation Index, 1926- (Web of Science) This link opens in a new window
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Life sciences and biomedical articles, reviews, and reports covering pre-clinical and experimental research, methods and instrumentation, animal studies, and more. Includes journals, meetings, patents, and books. (Index)
Fish, Fisheries & Aquatic Biodiversity Worldwide This link opens in a new window
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Journal articles and research on ichthyology, fisheries, aquaculture and aquatic and marine biology. Includes some major fish and fisheries databases, such as FISHLIT, Aquatic Biology Citations, Fishing Industry Research Index, and the Fisheries Review. (Full-Text and Index)
Toxnet This link opens in a new window
A publicly available government resource that provides access to a group of databases on toxicology, hazardous chemicals, and related information. It includes HSDB (Hazardous Substances Data Bank), CCRIS (Chemical Carcinogenesis Research Info System), TRI (Toxic Release Inventory), TOXLINE (journal articles about toxic substances), and other related databases. TOXNET features TOXMAP, maps depicting toxic chemical locations across the United States.
Wildlife & Ecology Studies Worldwide This link opens in a new window
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Journals, magazines, books, and conference papers about wild mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians.Major topic areas include studies of individual species, habitat types, hunting, economics, wildlife behavior, management techniques, diseases, ecotourism, zoology, taxonomy, and much more. (Index)
Zoological Record, 1864- (Web of Science) This link opens in a new window
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Index to scientific literature in animal biology, paleobiology, and zoology, including journals, books, and reports on biodiversity, the environment, taxonomy, and veterinary sciences. (Index)

To see All available databases, go to the Databases LibGuide.

Undergraduate Students: Searching for articles?

Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
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Covering a wide range of popular magazines and scholarly journals, Academic Search Premier is a first choice for finding full-text articles on most topics.

Additional Information about PubMed

PubMed MEDLINE Searching: Veterinary Medicine: Provides search tips and and a list of the veterinary medicine journals indexed in PubMed. Last revised: April 2017.

Evidence-based Veterinary Medicine Resources

VetSRev
VetSRev is a freely accessible online database of citations for systematic reviews of relevance to veterinary medicine and science. The systematic reviews in VetSRev are found by searches of the PubMed and CAB Abstracts databases using specialised search filters, as well as alerts and contact with authors.
BestBETs for Vets
BET stands for Best Evidence Topic. BETs are simple reviews of the current best evidence available to answer very common and specific clinical questions.
PICO.vet (Beta)
"PICO.vet is designed to help veterinary clinicians, researchers, librarians and others build a well-structured and focused clinical question that interactively searches the biomedical literature. "

Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis in Animal Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine

Zoonoses and Public Health (June 2014)
Special issue of Zoonoses and Public Health, Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis in Animal Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine. All articles are open-access.