The World Health Assembly has designated 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, so we are particularly pleased to highlight the British resource available through Penn Libraries, MIDIRS, the Maternity and Infant Care Database.

Developed and managed by the British charity Midwives Information and Resource Service, MIDIRS indexes several hundred English language journals, books, guidelines and grey literature in the fields of midwifery, pregnancy, labor , birth, feeding, and other topics in maternal health, perinatal and postnatal care. MIDIRS currently includes more than a quarter of a million articles from key journals in the field as well as from MIDIRS’ own Midwifery Digest, which has been publishing online since 1991. The database includes resources dating back to 1857, but comprehensive coverage of key sources in the midwifery and maternal health literature in MIDIRS begins in 1988 with new content added daily.

MIDIRS is not a full-text source, but since it’s integrated into our platforms, PennText links are available to obtain PDFs of articles or to request interlibrary loan. While many of the journals indexed in MIDIRS are familiar sources currently well-integrated in Pubmed and other databases, there are a large number of newsletters, regional professional publications, sources from the Global South and other literature that will enrich and complete your research.

MIDIRS can be searched separately or integrated into a multi-database search on the Penn Libraries’ OVID database platform here (this resource searches multiple life sciences and other databases simultaneously with options to deduplicate results).

For more information, contact Richard James at rjame@upenn.edu