Literature Searches for Animal Testing Alternatives

For help completing IACUC protocol applications.

Free Online Databases

The U.S. government produces a number of federally-funded public access databases. The most well-known of these, in the medical community, is PubMed MEDLINE. While PubMed MEDLINE may be your first choice for medical research, the other options listed here may also be very useful. They include databases for general agricultural research, toxicity and cell-line data, and reports & proposals from research projects receiving federal funding. Also included in this list are mutagenicity and toxicity databases developed and maintained by a few non-governmental organizations.

PubMed This link opens in a new window
Produced by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), PubMed provides free access to MEDLINE, NLM's database of bibliographic citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. See also MEDLINE.

AGRICOLA
CRIS: Current Research Information Service
CRIS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) documentation and reporting system for ongoing and recently completed research projects in agriculture, food and nutrition, and forestry. Projects are conducted or sponsored by USDA research agencies, state agricultural experiment stations, the state land-grant university system, other cooperating state institutions, and participants in a number of USDA-administered grant programs. CRIS Help: http://cris.csrees.usda.gov/help.html
RePORTER (NIH)
The information found in RePORTER is drawn from several extant databases–eRA databases, Medline, PubMed Central, the NIH Intramural Database, and iEdison–using newly-formed linkages among these disparate data sources. In general, the RePORTER database of research projects is updated weekly. RePORTER Help: http://projectreporter.nih.gov/report_manual.cfm
ECOTOX: Ecotoxicology Database
The ECOTOXicology database (ECOTOX) is a source for locating single chemical toxicity data for aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife. ECOTOX was created and is maintained by the U.S.EPA, Office of Research and Development (ORD) , and the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory's (NHEERL's) Mid-Continent Ecology Division (MED).
TOXNET
TOXNET (TOXicology Data NETwork) has moved and most of NLM's toxicology information services have been integrated into other NLM products and services.
CompMed
CompMed™ is an e-mail list, maintained by AALAS, for discussion of comparative medicine, laboratory animals, and topics related to biomedical research. The listserv archives are an excellent source for alternatives searching.
Google Scholar
Covers a broad range of peer-reviewd and gray literature but is not recommended due to -

Searches are not easily replicable, especially with passage of time
PubMed records are duplicated here (i.e. searching Google Scholar then searching PubMed would yield no additional/different results)
Sources must be verified and evaluated on an individual basis since resources are not vetted
Accessing full-text can be difficult