This can refer to the results of clinical trials, or it could be a systematic review of all the research on a particular condition. A good starting point is the Cochrane Library, which is available to everyone in England, and contains a database of systematic reviews, also known as secondary research. Secondary research is created by systematically locating, appraising, and summarising evidence from scientific research in order to obtain a reliable overview.
If you don’t find anything here, then you could try a database, called PubMed. This is a searchable database containing over 19 million citations from biomedical articles. Citations give you the title, author, journal details, and in most cases, an abstract of the article. In some cases, you can also get the full text of the article for free, although most will not be freely available.
Another database you could try is the TRIP database. This has been designed for health professionals, but it is free to use and accessible to patients too. Just type in the name of the treatment or condition you are looking for, and TRIP will identify evidence based synopses, systematic reviews, primary research, and patient information.
Many journal publishers are making their journals freely available, also known as “open access”. One collection, PubMed Central, contains more than 800 journals where there is no charge to read the articles. Some journals, such as Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, Journal of the American Medical Association, and the New England Journal of Medicine, only make a selection of their articles freely available.
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