Hospital or State Medical School Librarians
A good way to start your research is to contact your hospital or state medical school librarian. Most moderate sized to large hospitals have their own medical librarian. And even the smallest hospitals can use state medical school librarians. This would also be true for private practice therapists, who as tax payers can use the state medical school librarians.

The hospitals and state medical school libraries can get some full text journal articles for free and some for a fee, they also should allow access to loaning books. You could think of your hospital library as a conduit to larger libraries. 

General Access and Links to Articles
A helpful hint prior to initiating any search through PubMed/MEDLINE or any database is to construct a well-built clinical question on your area of research. Choosing the most effective keywords can help identify the highest quality studies. A recommended link is:

CEBM (Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine) www.cebm.net/index.asp
This website will help you construct focused questions by teaching you the "PICO" structure. This will help you develop effective keywords for your searches. Read the section on EBM (evidence-based medicine) Tools.

PubMed www.pubmed.com
PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that has over 17 million citations ranging from Medline to other life science journals, which date back to the 1966.

Search methods within PubMed:

Entrez: When doing a search you will use a text-based search and retrieval system that is called the "Entrez retrieval system".

LinkOut: This service of PubMed provides access to some full-text articles at journal web sites and other related Web resources.

Tools within PubMed to help with your research

PubMed Tutorial: Pubmed offers online a longer more in-depth tutorial and also a shorter tutorial called the "PubMed Quick Tour". Reviewing this will help you search the text within particular fields.

PubMed Overview Page: This is helpful page for anyone who has not done any searches to get a nice overview and understanding of all of the areas under the PubMed system.

NCBI: NCBI is a tool that retains your information and preferences to provide customized services. It allows you to save searches, select filtering options, and set up automatic searches that are sent by email. NCBI stands for the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Batch Citation Matcher: This allows you to match your citation to PubMed citations using bibliographic information such as journal, volume, issue, page number and year.

MEDLINE: MEDLINE is the largest bibliographic database of PubMed. It was created through the National Library of Medicine (NLM). MEDLINE contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from over 5,000 biomedical journals published in the United States and 80 other countries.

Medical Subject Headings (MeSh) within MEDLINE

A distinct feature of MEDLINE is that records are indexed with the NLM's controlled vocabulary which is called MeSh. This is a guideline in finding words that might be helpful in your search or how the terms might be indexed for your research.

CINAHL www.cinahl.com
It is the cumulative index to nursing and allied health literature. They index about 2,000 journals and provide about 500 in full text. This is a wonderful resource for therapists for the allied health sciences. You need to have an account to use or through an institution such as your hospital.

Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com
This is a very helpful tool for someone at the onset of starting their research as it will set up a template for advanced searching in the biomedical literature.

Database of Systematic Reviews

Cochrane Library www.cochrane.org
This is a database of systematic reviews. It costs for full-text reviews, but you can browse free summaries.

Database Suppliers

Ovid and Ebsco are both database suppliers. www.ovid.com

www.ebsco.com

Dialog also is a database supplier. It is very expensive, it accrues per minute. On the other hand, it has over 600 databases among those are MEDLINE, and a science citation index called, EMBASE (a European version of MEDLINE). www.dialog.com

Other Links

University of Utah Health Science Center http://www.medlib.med.utah.edu
California Digital Library http://www.cdlib.org/
New York University Library http://www.bobcat.nyu.edu/
Brigham Young University Library http://www.lib.byu.edu
Ohio State Libraries http://library.ohio-state.edu/search
Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, a research library which will do interlibrary loans directly - http://www.lindahall.org

Free Texts of Articles

First, check with your hospital librarian to see if they can get you the full article, as they may hold an electronic collection.

For free full text medical journals: http://www.freemedicaljournals.com . This is not true for all of the journals that are listed on the website. There are very few applicable journals to hand therapy on this site, but it may be worth visiting.

Document Delivery Service Providers

First check with your hospital librarian because the institution may have access or be a member of OCLC, Inc. or DOCLINE. These are two access services that can only be accessed through a library (not necessarily medical libraries) and provide access to other libraries collections. www.oclc.org

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/docline/

You can find more available services by accessing www.docdel.net.com web site. Most of the websites on this site can actually be accessed through the library (OCLC, Inc. or DOCLINE). Please note, if you use these other sites, you must set up an account and the costs may vary.

Other

JHT Author Advisory Panel paul.lastayo@health.utha.edu

Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org
If you want background information on any topic this is a good place to start.