Midwifery - Links to Sites Related to Midwifery, Medicine and Health Care

This page is designed to provide information for students in Philadelphia University's Midwifery Program. It identifies Gutman Library and Internet resources that will assist students in completing research projects.

Database Resources at Gutman Library

   The following databases are accessible through the Gutman Library Web site. Students attempting to access them from off-campus sites will need to follow our instructions for remote database access. A valid Philadelphia University network account is required (contact your program coordinator if you do not have an account or if you encounter any other difficulty). More information and instructions can be found on our "What's New" page. 

First Search - provides access to several health and allied health care information sources. These include:

• CINAHL - Current Index to Nursing and Allied Health Journal. This database provides abstracted versions of articles from hundreds of allied health profession journals. 
• Medline - While there are some free versions of Medline on the Internet, none has as versatile a search interface. A key advantage of FirstSearch databases in that the articles (again - NO full text in CINAHL or Medline) will have information to tell you the names of libraries that own the journal. This makes it easy to determine if a library in your vicinity owns a particular book or journal.
• Others - As a multidisciplinary system, FirstSearch has other databases that may be useful including PsycFirst for psychology articles and ERIC for education articles.
• Articles found using FirstSearch can be e-mailed.

ProQuest - provides access to full-text (mostly) articles from both general news sources (hundreds of magazines and newspapers, including the NYT, Wall St. Journal and there is also a health care related database:

• Full-Text Nursing Journals - includes the full text articles from approximately 250 journals in the field of nursing. Also allows articles to be emailed.

Harrison's Online - the well-known and respected medical text book can serve as a good starting point in obtaining background information about a wide range of medical topics. The full-text of all articles is available. Harrison's also include charts, diagrams, and other images.

Other Databases - Gutman Library provides access to many other databases, though they are non-medical in nature. However, you are welcome to use any of our electronic resources, and some, such as LexisNexis are broad based in their coverage and may prove to be worthwhile for all types of research. You can learn more about our databases, get descriptions, and get connected to them using our Database Selection Page.

Gutman Library Services for Midwifery Students

Interlibrary Loan - Midwifery students will often seek out articles from the medical literature at local hospitals libraries with which they may be affiliated. In the event you are seeking an article that you are not able to obtain, you are welcome to use our library's Interlibrary Loan service. You can find additional information on how to request the service on our Interlibrary Loan web page. That is where you will also find the forms for requesting the loan of a book or journal article.

Circulation of Books - Gutman Library does not have a particularly strong collection of medical or allied health books within its overall collection. We are still developing those areas of our collection, but this library is not likely to achieve the type of collection one finds at an academic medical research library. If you do want to search our book collection you may use PhilaFIND, our online library catalog. You will find a link on our library home page. If you find a book that you would like to obtain, we will coordinate that with you. You should contact Stan Gorski, the library's liaison to the School of Science & Health.

Reference Service - The library staff is at your disposal for providing assistance with research questions. Please contact us if you need any sort of help, from quick reference questions to more complicated research queries. There are two ways to reach us. You can call or send e-mail directly to a staff member. You will find this information on our staff directory. Or, if you prefer, you can send your question as e-mail to reference@philau.edu  If you are more adventurous you may want to try RefChat!, our real-time chat service. During scheduled hours a librarian is standing by to engage in an online chat with you, and will try to answer your question quickly during your Internet chat session.

Finding Medical and Health Care Information on the Internet

We invite you to make use of our medical resources web page. There you will find links to a large number of resources for medical and health information. Chief among these is PubMed, the free Internet version of the Medline database. Some students may find this more convenient to use than the FirstSearch version (which offers a better search interface and information not found in PubMed). All students who use the Internet for obtaining medical or health care information must carefully evaluate web sites for accuracy, timeliness and other factors. If you would like to learn more about evaluating web sites, you should examine our self-paced tutorial on this topic. It is found on our tutorials page. A good starting point for finding information for midwifery on the Internet is the Internet for Nursing, Midwifery, and Health Visiting site. It offers a "teach yourself" tutorial on Internet information skills for midwives and others. Included within the tutorial are links to many useful midwifery web sites. If you need assistance in finding information on the Internet, feel free to seek assistance from the library staff of Gutman Library. We refer to ourselves as "the human search engines." If it can be found on the web, we can find it.

Further Assistance or Information on Gutman Library Resources for Midwifery Students

If you have questions about library services or resources that you do not see on this page, we welcome you to contact for further assistance. You have multiple options for contacting us as indicated above and we encourage you to do so. Thank you.