A project of the Kaiser Family Foundation with comprehensive information on all global healthi issues. Also spotlights reports from other intergovernmental agencies and NGOs. Highly recommended. The first place to look! From this site you also gain easy access to GlobalHealthFacts.org, a companion site for the latest information on HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis.

HNPStats- the World Bank's Health, Nutrition and Population data platform -  a one-stop data source for health, nutrition and population indicators from various national and international data sources. It provides direct access to more than 100 indicators, with time series for countries and country groups from 1960 to the most recent year, where data are available.

OECD is Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development,  whose membership consists of 30 countries in western and eastern Europe. Also includes Japan and Korea, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. It collects health statistics from its members and has relationships with other developing countries such as China, Brazil and Russia.

The WHO Statistical Information System is the guide to health and health-related epidemiological and statistical information available from the World Health Organization. An important report is the World Health Report, published annually. You can find the core health indicators for countries here.

The world's countries at a glance. Useful for geographic orientation, an overview of essential health, environmental and population characteristics. This is frequently updated and has many relevant information to public health such as trafficking in persons, environmental challenges and transnational disputes. Well-documented notes and appendices make it an important authoritative source.

Official description: "The network will synthesise evidence, conduct new analyses, devise programmatic recommendations, and formulate proposals for action in international health and development." A mix of medical news of the week with alerts of recently published significant reports or findings. Useful in keeping current with important global public health issues.

This online news digest service from the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health offers a combination of orginal reporting and a digest of news stories from newspapers and magazines worldwide on pressing public health issues.The "News and Commentary" section focusses on health news from Africa, North America, Asia and Europe. 

A global disease alert program draws from disparate data sources to provide visualization of outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts from WHO.  The data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. Due to the nature of the links, you can get up-to-date disease reports from the original language source from Asia and Europe. This interface is available in English and Spanish and news accounts are often translated, providing access to far flung regions not usually covered by conventional press.

Newspaper collections from NewsBank provide full-text articles from the electronic editions of record for more than 700 newspapers around the globe, including the NY Times (2000-present). Database covers 1977-present.

Full-text of thousands of newspapers, magazines, news transcripts, reference works, and legal materials. Includes NY Times (1980-current)

Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, government documents, statistical compilations, committee reports, intergovernmental, and private organizations reports. Areas covered include political, economic, social and public policy issues. Covers 1915-present.

Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Covers 1971-present. A great first database to search. Numerous sources range from popular magazines to peer-reviewed science journals.

Includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. Includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources. PubMed is the National Library of Medicine's search service that provides access to over 11 million citations in MEDLINE, PreMEDLINE, and other related databases, with links to participating online journals. PubMed contains bibliographic citations and abstracts from approximately 3900 current biomedical journals. Many journals are available through our subscription or free courtesy of  PubMed Central. Follow the MORE! link to see if we can get access for you through TriCollege or InterLibrary loan.

Provides full-text access to life sciences journal literature. Sponsored by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Coverage dates vary by journal. Many public health journals concerning minority and ethnic health topics can be found here by keyword search. It is a good complementary source to a PubMed search.

Searches against the same database but with relevance ranking. Search terms are highlighted for easy scanning of results. Worth using for a first go-around. For more in-depth searching or more targeted searching using medical subject headings, use PubMed. You also get the convenient FindIt link to fulltext if you connect to Pubmed through Tripod.

For Haverford College users, this provides access to the Social Sciences Citation Index 1997-present , Science Citation Index 1972 - present. Search for scholarly articles in any discipline, or for articles that cite a known author or work. Coverage varies. Not just for citation searching (who cited whom) but also for general topic searching.

Provides full-text access to articles, dictionary terms, biographies, research updates and links to related websites in all areas of science and technology. Covers 2000-present. 

A one-stop information source to learn about disease conditions, patient education and research and patient support organizations for specific conditions. Sponsored by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

from the National Library of Medicine -Comprehensive site with information on drugs and supplements, medical dictionary and encyclopedia and convenient access to both consumer and professional level literature.

Explains diseases in simple English. Multimedia resources (animations, audio, photographs and videos) help illustrate complex subjects. Each topic has links to an audio glossary and multimedia.

The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the approval of all drugs, biologicals, medical devices, cosmetics and radiological products. Check out this FDA Consumer Magazine article on clinical trials and what constitutes informed consent. The FDA homepage has links to appropriate information for various target audiences. Guidance documents on good clinical practices in clinical trials are posted.

This Resource Center provides consumers with provides information on listings of drugs in clinical research, clinical trials, clinical trial results, FDA approvals to keep up with the latest in scientific and drug development.

This is the official site from NIH for finding clinical trials from 161 countries by condition, location, sponsor, study type (interventional, observational and expanded access) and status. Resources listed on the same page are useful for understanding  the process and the language used in clinical trials for a basic understanding in order to be an informed participant.

This search interface is only available in English but receives clinical trials data worldwide.

• Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR)
• Chinese Clinical Trial Register (ChiCTR)
• ClinicalTrials.gov (U.S. NIH but contains information from 161 countries)
• Clinical Trials Registry - India (CTRI)
• German Clinical Trials Register (DRKS)
• ISRCTN.org (an international non-profit organization that seeks to create unique IDs for clinical trials)
• The Netherlands National Trial Register (NTR)

The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation representing national industry associations and companies from both developed and developing countries. Input search criteria for finding  ongoing and completed clinical trials can be entered in German, French, Japanese and Spanish, as well as English. The search facility suggests synonyms for medical conditions and helps to correct misspelled words, including the names of medicines. There is a separate search engine for pediatric clinical trials for both ongoing and completed trials. This interface taps into several third-party portals worldwide and is funded by major pharmaceutical companies mainly based in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

The Portal's search engine has been programmed to access relevant on-line sources of clinical trial information. These include individual pharmaceutical company sites, sites run by third parties working on behalf of these companies, pharmaceutical industry association resources, such as the US pharmaceutical industry association (PhRMA) site clinicalstudyresults.org and government sites which routinely carry details of industry trials, such as the US National Library of Medicine's http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Other on-line clinical trial information resources, such as the European Union's planned Europharm facility, may be linked to as they become available.

Originally founded as an international organisation under Belgian law in 1962 by eminent oncologists working in the main cancer research institutes of the EU countries and Switzerland.became the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) in 1968. The aims are to develop, conduct, coordinate, and stimulate translational and clinical research in Europe to improve the management of cancer and related problems by increasing survival but also patient quality of life.

Need to look up a drug mentioned in a clinical trial? Use this portal to look up brand name of category name. Extensive pharmokinetic information, adverse effects, associated medical literature and clinical trials.

A one-stop resource for easily accessible information on clinical trials of malaria, HIV/AIDS, and TB drugs, vaccines and microbicides. From this homepage, you can search for current trials, obtain information on African clinical trial sites, view a continent-wide map of Africa that displays clinical trials and sites, and access useful clinical trial tools and collaborative worksites. Records are also linked to NIH's ClinicalTrials.gov database but this has more local information and geographic visualization.

For on-going trials only. No historical information.

ASCTP is a comprehensive online resource for easily accessible information on malaria, HIV/AIDS, and TB clinical trials in Asia. The portal is a one-stop resource that allows users to:

• Access clinical trial information using a database of pre-licensure clinical trials of malaria, HIV/AIDS, and TB drugs, vaccines and microbicides that are currently underway in Asia.
• Obtain accurate information on clinical trial sites in Asia.
• View a continent-wide map that displays clinical trial and site information using interactive web-based mapping technology.

More help on citing all kinds of medical information is available in the following text:
Patrias, K. Citing medicine: the NLM style guide for authors, editors, and publishers [Internet]. 2nd ed. Wendling, DL, technical editor. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2007 [updated 2009 Jan 14; cited Year Month Day]. Available from: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/citingmedicine

The registry record will be the only publicly available document on a trial until results from the trial are published. This FAQ lists the various situations where this is necessary.

On July 12, 1974, the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) was signed into law, there-by creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report attempts to summarize the basic ethical principles identified by the Commission in the course of its deliberations.

A code of ethics authored and honored by World Medical Association primariily addressed to physician but encourages other participants in medical research involving human subjects to adopt these principles.

Wood, AJJ. Progress and Deficiencies in the Registration of Clinical Trials. N Engl J Med 360(8), 824.

Details summary of Section 801 FDA Amendment Act of 2007 notes in general:

• Strengthens requirements for registration- all trials except Phase I with a US site  must be registered no later than 21 days after enrollment of first participant
• Basic results reporting must be no later than 1 year after the date that the final subject was examined or received an intervention.
• For trials to establish new uses of already approved drug, reporting can be delayed up to 3 years.

Section 801 of the FDA Amendments Act enacted in September 2007 mandated incremental expansion of results posted on ClinicatlTrials.gov. As new policies promote transparency of clinical trials through registries and results databases, further issues arise and require examination.

Zarin DA, Tse  T. MEDICINE: Moving Toward Transparency of Clinical Trials. Science  7 March 2008; 319 (5868), 1340.

From the website:
CONSORT, which stands for Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials, encompasses various initiatives developed by the CONSORT Group to alleviate the problems arising from inadequate reporting of randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

The main product of CONSORT is the CONSORT Statement, which is an evidence-based, minimum set of recommendations for reporting RCTs. It offers a standard way for authors to prepare reports of trial findings, facilitating their complete and transparent reporting, and aiding their critical appraisal and interpretation.

Hopewell S, Clarke M, et al. (2008) CONSORT for Reporting Randomized Controlled Trials in Journal and Conference Abstracts: Explanation and Elaboration. PLoS Med 5(!):e20. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050020

This article explains the checklist times in CONSORT, give an example for each item and explains why and what makes a good description for each item.