International Pharmaceutical Abstracts tutorial

Introduction

Welcome to the International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) tutorial! This tutorial has been designed to help you familiarise yourself with using the IPA database as used on the OVID interface.

These sessions can be done in the order presented in the left hand menu, or you can skip to an another session as required.

IPA provides worldwide coverage of pharmaceutical science and Health related literature. It contains comprehensive information on drug therapy, toxicity and pharmacy practice as well as legislation, regulation, technology, utilization, bio-pharmaceutics, information processing, education, economics, and ethics as related to pharmaceutical science and practice.

These pages are designed for a standard browser. Some sections include a FLASH movie. If you can't access the movies the same information is explained in text format.

Sections

Search Strategies: An introduction to the concepts of effective searching - useful for any database.
(3-5 minutes).

The IPA environment: All the buttons and options on the IPA screen explained.
(2-5 minutes).

IPA Records and results: Looking at the structure of the records and understanding the various functions available with the records.
(3-4 minutes).

Keywords: Performing searches. This includes specifying fields and refining searches.
(5 minutes).