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National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR)

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Databases and Retrieval Services

NICHSR coordinates the development of new information products and services related to health services research.

Jump to: HSR Literature: Grey Literature, HSR Filters Project and Accessing HSR Literature at NLM, HSRProj, HSTAT, HSRR, DIRLINE, and PubMed and NLM Gateway

HSR Literature

Identifying and Archiving Grey Literature in HSR

Health Services Research (HSR) Filters Project

These specialized Health Services Research (HSR) searches are intended for researchers, clinicians, health policy analysts and planners and have built-in search "filters" based largely on the work of Haynes RB, et al. Four health care quality categories and two health care cost categories (note: economics is a subset of the more general costs category) are provided, and the emphasis may be broader (i.e., mostly relevant articles but probably some less relevant ones too) or narrower (i.e., mostly relevant articles but probably omitting a few). See definitions for details about study methodology criteria. The resulting retrieval can be further refined using PubMed's Limits e.g., English language.

Accessing HSR Literature at NLM

HealthSTAR (Health Services Technology, Administration, and Research) was an online bibliographic information service that resided as a separate database available from the National Library of Medicine from February 1994 (originally called HSTAR) to December 2000. Materials specially selected with a focus on health services research including clinical (emphasizing the evaluation of patient outcomes and the effectiveness of procedures, programs, products, services, and processes) and non-clinical (emphasizing health care administration, economics, planning, and policy) aspects of health care delivery, that comprised HealthSTAR, have now migrated to other NLM online web-based environments: (1) journal citations are being added weekly to NLM's PubMed (http://PubMed.gov ) (2) books, book chapters, technical reports and conference papers are added regularly to NLM's online catalog, LocatorPlus (http://locatorplus.gov), and (3) meeting abstracts from AcademyHealth (formerly the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy), Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) (formerly International Society of Technology Assessment in Health Care), and the Cochrane Colloquium annual conferences have moved to the NLM Gateway (http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/).

Users can go to these specific environments to search for HSR literature or they can use the NLM Gateway to simultaneously search across all information services. Although HealthSTAR ceases to exist as a separate database, the selection and acquisition of HSR published and grey literature is still ongoing and is coordinated jointly through the NLM National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR), Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC), and Technical Services Division.

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HSRProj (Health Services Research Projects in Progress)

A database of citations to research-in-progress funded by federal, state, private organization, and foundation grants and contracts, HSRProj builds upon a database developed in prototype by staff of the AcademyHealth (formerly the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy) and the Cecil Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts. It provides access to information about research in progress before results are available in published form.

HSRProj is available for direct searching at a new Web address: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hsrproj. It is still available for cross file searching using the NLM Gateway.

HSTAT (Health Services/Technology Assessment Texts)

A free full-text electronic resource for health care decision making, HSTAT became available in 1994. Developed by NLM's Lister Hill Center, the system allows those interested in guidelines, technology assessments, and evidence-based medicine reports to search for and read them on the computer screens in their offices via the Internet or modem. It includes Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), formerly the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR), guideline and evidence documents and technology assessments, NIH Consensus Development Conference Statements and Technology Assessment Workshop Reports, the U.S. Task Force on Preventive Services' Guide to Clinical Preventive Services, HIV/AIDS Treatment Information Service (ATIS) approved guidelines, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Treatment Improvement Protocols and Prevention Enhancement Protocols, Office Of Disease Prevention And Health Promotion's (ODPHP) Put Prevention Into Practice, as well as links to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Prevention Guidelines Database.

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Health Services/Sciences Research Resources (HSRR)

HSRR is a searchable database of information about research datasets and instruments/indices. Users may examine and compare characteristics of some of the resources employed in Health Services Research, and the Behavioral and Social Sciences. The database includes brief descriptions of research resources and links to PubMed. It also includes URLs of providers for additional information or access to the resources.

DIRLINE (Directory of InformationResources onLINE)

An NLM database of organizations, DIRLINE has a special subfile covering health services research organizations including those involved in technology assessment and the development of practice guidelines.

PubMed and the NLM Gateway

PubMed is a World Wide Web (WWW) retrieval service developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed provides access, free of charge, to MEDLINE, a database of bibliographic citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, health services resesarch and preclinical sciences. PubMed also contains links to the full-text versions of articles at participating publishers' Web sites.

The NLM Gateway is a Web-based system that lets users search simultaneously in multiple retrieval systems at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). It allows users of NLM services to initiate searches from one Web interface, providing "one-stop searching" for many of NLM's information resources or databases. One target audience for the Gateway is the Internet user who is new to NLM's online resources and does not know what information is available there or how best to search for it. Other users may find the Gateway useful for an overall search of NLM's information resources. Some searchers may locate what they need immediately, while others will utilize the Gateway as an adjunct tool to other NLM search services such as PubMed and MEDLINEplus.

Training Tools

The PubMed Tutorial offers a just-in-time training alternative. The PubMed Tutorial is a Web-based interactive tutorial that enables anyone using a computer with Internet access to learn about PubMed. The tutorial can be reached directly from the PubMed sidebar by clicking Tutorial .

Also, PubMed and NLM Gateway training manuals are available in PDF and Word formats.

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