HINARI is a free or low-cost digital library of scholarly journals and books in biomedical and related social sciences. Through HINARI, eligible users can get to thousands of electronic journals and numerous online indexes, databases and books to help make clinical decisions, further education, and conduct research.
The HINARI Access to Research in Health Programme was set up by the World Health Organization together with major publishers.
Through the program, not-for-profit institutions in developing countries can have free or low-cost access to peer reviewed content online. As of 2012, more than 150 publisher partners are offering more than 15,000 information resources in HINARI and many others are joining the programme.
Country eligibility is based on three international measures of gross national income and development, and eligible countries either fit under Group A –free access, or Group B – low-cost access. The HINARI website - who.int/hinari contains detailed information about eligibility and registration.
Institutions, not individuals, can register with HINARI.
Once the institution is registered, all permanent and visiting faculty, staff and students can access HINARI through their institution’s username and password.
If you do not know your institutional username and password or if your institution is registered, please contact your librarian.
All resources within HINARI are accessible from one gateway. Start at who.int/hinari and click to log in. Once you type in the institutional username and password, you will come to the starting page.
On the center of the screen, you can browse available journals and books by title.
You can also browse the content by subject, language or publisher. Subject browsing may be very useful for seeing what is available in your area. Click on the content tab to go back.
On the starting page, you can also choose to search for articles in the PubMed database. This is a special version of PubMed that connects to the full text of articles through the HINARI collections or that are available for free.
On the right, you can access additional HINARI content. You can search other article databases, including some that offer full text, such as African Journals Online, or coverage in different subject areas, such as CINAHL (the cumulative index to nursing and allied health literature) and Scopus.
Under Reference Sources, numerous online reference sources, encyclopedias, manuals and textbooks are available.
And under Other Free Collections, you can easily connect to other free collections of biomedical and scientific content online.
This is the first in the video series will take you through the steps of some common tasks, such as finding the full text of an article, searching PubMed, and dealing with access problems and solutions.