Toxicology: Websites

Full-text toxicological information is found here; databases with references to the toxicological literature are found under the 'Find Articles' link

Relevant Free Information on the Web

ATSDR Information Center
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). Provides links to Most Viewed Toxic Substances, Popular Links, Related Pages, and offers A-Z Index
Comparative Toxicogenomics Database
Robust, publicly available database that aims to advance understanding about how environmental exposures affect human health. It provides manually curated information about chemical–gene/protein interactions, chemical–disease and gene–disease relationships. These data are integrated with functional and pathway data to aid in development of hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying environmentally influenced diseases.
ECOTOX Database
The ECOTOXicology knowledgebase (ECOTOX) is a source for locating single chemical toxicity data for aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife. ECOTOX was created and is maintained by the U.S.EPA, Office of Research and Development (ORD) , and the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory's (NHEERL's) Mid-Continent Ecology Division (MED)
PubChem
Open Chemistry database at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that includes Hazardous Substance Database content. Mostly contains small molecules, but also larger molecules such as nucleotides, carbohydrates, lipids, peptides, and chemically-modified macromolecules.
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How to access HSDB content from PubChem
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/toxnet/Accessing_HSDB_Content_from_PubChem.html
PubMed Chem Sketcher V2.4
Toxicological Profiles
Provided by the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR), Toxic Substances Portal. Contains information about contaminants found at hazardous waste sites
TOXNET - New Locations for TOXNET Content
TOXNET was retired in Dec. 2019. Most content will remain available through other NLM databases as well as from external websites

Toxicology Professional Associations

Critical Questions

Here are some questions to guide you through the process of critical evaluation of information sources:

Relevance:
- Is the document related to your topic?
- Is the information at an appropriate depth or level for your assignment?

Authority:
- Is the source a scholarly or popular publication? And is the publisher reputable in this discipline?
- Is the author a recognized authority in this field of study? What are his or her credentials? (And are these credentials related to the subject matter?)
- Do other authors quote from this author's works?
- Is there a means of contacting the author?

Timeliness/Currency:
- When was the document written? (Look for a publication, copyright, or “last updated” date.)
- Is it recent enough to be relevant to your topic or discipline? Sometimes you are required to use recently published material; sometimes you must use historical documents.

Validity/Accuracy:
- Does the author provide sources for statistical information?
- Is the data from a valid study (that utilized accepted methodologies for the discipline)?

Argument:
- Analyze the author's argument, the assumptions made, the evidence or data gathered, and the interpretation of the data.
- Are there any flaws in the author's logic?
- Does the author consider alternate interpretations of the evidence?
- If you discovered that the author ignored other interpretations, is the author attempting to deceive or manipulate readers?

Coverage:
- Does the author refer to relevant information or data that was available at the time the work was published?
- Or, does the author use out-of-date information; or ignore information or data that was available at the time?
- Did the author consider all aspects relevant to the topic?

Bias/Objectivity:
- Does the author state any bias?
- If you discovered any omissions in the coverage of the topic, did this reveal a bias or prejudice?
- Is the author selling something? Do they have a corporate sponsor?