LibGuides: Decolonising your reading list: Health and medicine

Recommended texts for Health and Medicine

Black health and wellbeing in Britain resource list from University of Bristol

Decolonizing the university: the challenge of deep cognitive justice / Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Fatal invention: how science, politics and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century/ Dorothy Roberts
Medicalizing blackness : making racial differences in the Atlantic world, 1780-1840 / Rana A. Hogarth
Mind the gap handbook (2020)
Pedagogies of Widening Participation in Medical Settings: Addressing under-representation through partnership and professionalism / Louise Alldridge
Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge / Laurelyn Whitt

Articles and reports

Lokugamage AU, Ahillan T, Pathberiya SDC. Decolonising ideas of healing in medical education, Journal of Medical Ethics (2020);46:265-272.
BMJ Special issue: Racism in Medicine
Curtis, E., Jones, R., Tipene-Leach, D. et al. Why cultural safety rather than cultural competency is required to achieve health equity: a literature review and recommended definition. International Journal for Equity in Health 18, 174 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-019-1082-3
BMA report: Differential attainment, making medical training fair for all (2017)

Useful tools for teaching

Garvey, Amy et al. “From Race to Racism: Teaching a Tool to Critically Appraise the Use of Race in Medical Research.” MedEdPORTAL : the journal of teaching and learning resources vol. 18 11210. 24 Jan. 2022, doi:10.15766/mep_2374-8265.11210
Naicker, R. Critically Appraising for Antiracism. Available at: https://www.criticallyappraisingantiracism.org/home

Databases and search engines

Many of the databases we subscribe to have filters and options which enable you to find results in various languages. You can also change the language of the interface in most cases; however, options to actually search in different languages tend to be limited. Ovid, for example, allows you to change the language of the interface to French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese and Korean. However, you are still only able to search in languages using the Roman alphabet. EBSCO databases, on the other hand (eg. CINAHL, SportDiscus), have the search functionality for a range of languages.

Regardless of the ability to switch the interface language, English-language research dominates.

Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of health sciences or multidisciplinary databases which have a specific focus on research which is not in the English language, while also providing search functionality in different languages.

This list has been adapted from the University of Lancaster's "Decolonising Literature Searching" library guide. Further resources and guidance can be found here.

Global

Epistemonikos
A multilingual database of health evidence, particularly useful for identifying systematic reviews. Can be searched in 9 languages, and all articles entering the database are translated into each language. These are: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Global Index Medicus
The Global Index Medicus (GIM) provides worldwide access to biomedical and public health literature produced by and within low-middle income countries. The main objective is to increase the visibility and usability of this important set of resources. The material is collated and aggregated by WHO Regional Office Libraries on a central search platform allowing retrieval of bibliographical and full text information. Searchable in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
OpenDOAR
Jisc global Directory of Open Access Repositories. Browse by country to find repositories of academic material.

Africa

AfricArXiv
An open-access repository for preprints, which, as noted on its "Languages" page, "enourages submissions in languages that are commonly used by the scientific community in the respective country, such as English, French, Swahili, Zulu, Afrikaans, Igbo, Akan, or other native African languages."

Latin America and Caribbean

LILACS
Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature. Search in English, Spanish or Portuguese.
Oasisbr
The Brazilian Open Access Publications and Scientific Data portal. Search in English or Brazilian Portuguese.
Redalyc
A multidisciplinary database of open access journals covering Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal. Produced by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México.
Scielo (Scientific Electronic Library Online)
A multidisciplinary platform covering Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and South Africa. Strong coverage of articles in Spanish and Portuguese.

Saudi Arabia, Emirates and Gulf States

Al Manhal eLibrary
Multidisciplinary, Arabic-language database. Search functionality is free, and it is possible to add an "open access" filter; however, much material on this platform will not be available without a subscription.

Southeast Asia

Vietnam Journals Online
Multidisciplinary; search in English or Vietnamese.

Suggestions?

Contact Isobel Eddyshaw or Amy McEwan, Academic Liaison Librarians for the College of Medicine and Health with any suggestions.