Where to now? Searching beyond Medline

Searching the literature for research or professional purposes generally starts with established evidence-based sources such as textbooks, reference sources, guidelines, bibliographic databases and peer-reviewed journal articles. This article outlines the other resources available to you after you have completed your initial search and are seeking to broaden its scope. In this article, we describe a set of freely available search tools that will expand your search of the literature to find other published formats such as preprints and reports.

This approach has its dangers. You may encounter journal articles from predatory or junk journals and publications that have not been subject to peer review. This requires you to exercise critical judgement of the material. We point you to tools that will guide you through a critical evaluation.

Repositories are essentially large databases of published and sometimes unpublished material. They are organised in two ways:

An example of a relevant institutional repository is amber—the Ambulance Research Repository (https://amber.openrepository.com). It contains publications by staff and researchers working in NHS ambulance services in England from 2006 to date, and is a unique record of publications about paramedicine. It contains records of publications not included in the major bibliographic databases mentioned in the introduction to this article. A search of amber will inform any research endeavour in the area of ambulance services and related topics. An example of a subject repository in biomedical and life sciences would be European PubMed Central (https://europepmc.org)