Database Guides
International Pharmaceutical Abstracts
This database contains information from over 800 pharmaceutical, medical, and health-related journals published worldwide since 1970.
This extensive database covers all aspects of pharmacy, drug therapy and related ethical issues. It also includes coverage of issues relating to toxicology, non medical and pharmacist prescribing and health promotion.
Finding Journal Articles
When searching for journal articles, break down your topic into keywords and phrases and enter them on different lines
You can use various search techniques to add in extra terms, narrow results down and get more useful results:
- phrase searching i.e. including the terms in quotation marks to ensure they appear together rather than being split up and
- boolean search
- AND – narrows down the results. All connected terms must be included in the results
- OR – broadens out the results. Either connected term can be included in the results
- NOT – narrows down the results. The second term must be excluded from the results
At the bottom of the search screen you will see Search Options. In most cases you will not need to use these options, and most can be applied once you see your list of results.
Once you have entered relevant keywords and phrases, click Search to view a list of results.
Top Tip!
If your search results are disappointing, try to think of different ways of expressing your topic, for example:
- For smoking try tobacco or cigarettes
- Add the wildcard symbol * to the root of a word to find all words beginning with the letters in front of it
- smok* would find smoke, smoker, smokers, smoking and smoked at the same time.
- "community pharmacist*" would find pharmacist and pharmacists at the same time. You could also try "community pharmacy". Alternatively you could try communit* on one line and pharmacist* on another in case an article examines the provision of services by pharmacists working in communities rather than including the phrase "community pharmacist*".
Click on the title of a particularly relevant article to view the summary and see what subject terms have been used to describe that article. You can then search on those terms. For example you may wish to search for "smoking cessation".
To find out more about planning a search, creating search strategies and using different search techniques, explore our search techniques guide.
Narrowing Down Your Search
You can then use the options on the left of the screen under Refine Results to narrow down your search. You may wish to slide across the bar under Publication Date to limit your results to those from a particular time period.
Further down this section you may find options to narrow your search by:
- source (type of material)
- subject
- publication
Please note that a limit, once applied, stays in place until you click to remove it.
Getting the Full Text
Click on the title of the item in the results list to see further details and a summary of the item.
You can add details of an article to a Folder by clicking on the relevant icon. You can then email the details of all articles added to your folder to yourself or transfer those details to RefWorks.
International Pharmaceutical Abstracts does not contain full-text articles (although very occasionally the full-text of articles from some of our other EBSCOhost databases may be pulled through). Check if the full-text of an article is available in the library's collection by clicking on Full Text @ RGU.
If we have the full text article as part of another subscription, then you will be redirected to it. If we do not have the article, you will be told Full Text Not Available.
You may still be able to get the article, by requesting an Inter-Library Loan (ILLs). Remember to sign in to LibrarySearch to see this option. You can find out more about ILLs on our inter-library loans page.
