Q. What are the benefits of using certain databases? Such as why would someone use OVID, versus PubMed, versus CINAHL, etc.

CINAHL Ultimate (Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature)

• Provides indexing for more than 5,400 English-language journals and publications in the fields of nursing and allied health, including complete coverage of nursing journals and publications published by the National League for Nursing and the American Nurses' Association;
• Contains more than 4.1 million records dating back to 1937;
• CINAHL covers nursing, biomedicine, health sciences librarianship, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines;
• Also offers access to health care books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of practice, educational software, audiovisuals and book chapters. 

OVID Premier Nursing Journals Plus Nursing@Ovid

• Indexes over 400 nursing and allied health journals from all over the world;
• Full-text access to 14 highly-cited journals published by leading publishers, including premier titles from one of the world's biggest names in nursing publishing: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW).

MEDLINE (EBSCO)

• MEDLINE® is a bibliographic database produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
• The database contains more than 28 millions citations, derived from over 5,200 journals in about 40 languages 
• Covering the biomedical and life sciences, and indexed with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) from the NLM controlled vocabulary. 
• Extending back to 1946, annual input now exceeds 700,000 citations.

ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Database

• Contains over 250 full text journals in the fields of nursing, community health sciences, communications disorders and other health-related disciplines;
• Full text begins in the early to mid 1990's, but indexing goes back to the early 1980's.

PubMed with links to UMass Boston holdings

• Comprises more than 37 million citations and abstracts for biomedical literature* from the US National Library of Medicine's prestigious MEDLINE database, as well as from life science journals and online books;
• Indexing of articles (back to 1948) from approximately 5,200 biomedical journals published throughout the world;
• Also links to some free, open-access full text;
• *Covers the fields of biomedicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences.