Accessing public health information: a preliminary comparison of CABI's GLOBAL HEALTH database and MEDLINE

Access to a comprehensive public health index or database has been identified as problematic for health professionals. Public health literature contains many varied sources including reports, journal articles, and grey literature. Traditional biomedical databases such as MEDLINE often do not meet the needs of public health workers and researchers.

The aim of the study was to examine the unique content of the GLOBAL HEALTH database, by comparing it to the MEDLINE database. Pre-determined terms were used as baseline comparators where controlled vocabulary definitions in each database were sufficiently matched. Retrieved results were stored and compared using EndNote libraries.

Results obtained from the terms used in the comparison study protocol suggest that the GLOBAL HEALTH database holds a high proportion of unique records in comparison to MEDLINE. The largest overlap of duplicates from the GLOBAL HEALTH database perspective came from the coccidiomycosis results set which contained 70.5% of references retrieved from both databases. Analyzing the results from a MEDLINE perspective, the subject with the largest overlap was dengue, with a 43% overlap.

The results of this study show that the GLOBAL HEALTH database is complimentary to MEDLINE in the subject areas of public health and global health.