Searching Other Entrez Databases

The search examples covered so far focused primarily on the nucleotide and protein sequence databases. We also briefly looked at records in other Entrez databases by following the "Links" from the nucleotide sequence record for NM_000249 to PubMed and OMIM.

As you can see from the Entrez home page, many more databases are available. You can search all of these at once, by using the "search across databases" function (also known as "global query") at the top of the Entrez home page.

Or, you can search any individual database by clicking on the database name of interest. That will bring you to a cover page for that database, which provides background information, a query bar, and the Limits, Preview/Index functions for that database.

In particular, the Limits page for some Entrez databases provides an idea of how the data are organized and/or the types of data subsets users might want to access. The Limits page for the Entrez Gene, OMIM, SNP, and Genome Project databases are some examples. We don't have time to discuss all of these now, but they are mentioned here for your reference so you can take a look at them after the course and start getting to know those databaseses.

The number and variety of databases in Entrez will continue to grow. Nevertheless, the general search concepts covered in this module will continue to apply to all the databases.