How to search for bioethics literature

If you are looking for ways to access bioethics literature, here are several options that I have found to be useful.

1. Your university/institutional library:
If you are affiliated with a university or other institution that has access to online research tools, then your library will You can search for ethics resources in the same way that you would search for any other resources in Ovid. I usually search for a topic (such as “informed consent” or “access to medicine”) and then also search for “ethics” and map the two together. Most major journals include ethical topics in their scope of interest. Depending on the level of accessibility that your institution provides, you may have full text access to these articles.

2. The National Library of Medicine

3. PubMed – Make sure to limit your PubMed search to bioethics.

4. Project MUSE (“full text, affordable access to current content from prestigious humanities and social sciences journals”)

5. Kennedy Institute of Ethics – this includes ETHXWeb and GenETHX

6. Ethic Share – this search engine for ethics papers was recently launched. It has a great collection of sources. Although it is designed to link into your institution’s library system (I assume so that you could link to full text when available), that feature does not seem to be functioning at this time (at least not for me). I’m guessing that as the system is up longer, this issue will be resolved.

7. HighWire Press (Stanford) – Access to free online full text articles. According to its site “HighWire Press is the largest archive of free full-text science on Earth.” Not all articles are free, but many are, so it’s worth taking a look.

Good luck with your research!