Maternity and Infant Care is a resource provided by MIDIRS (Midwives Information and Resource Service). It is a source of information for professionals involved in the care of women and infants covering details of journal articles, grey literature and other sources.
Maternity and Infant Care covers topics including pregnancy, labour and birth as well as research relating to the first year of an infant’s life. It is most relevant to Midwifery students, but can also be relevant to certain topics from other disciplines that include work with women and infants such as Social Work, Child Nursing, Surgery, Public Health and many others.
MIC searches over 250,000 articles and other information sources, and presents an abstract or summary of each one to help you determine whether it is relevant to your needs. It has options for a simple search as well as for more complex searches suitable for in-depth research, and allows you to narrow your search down in useful ways such as by the date or the type of information.
The database can only be used by a small number of people at any given time. If you get a message saying this limit has been reached, you can come back later and try again.
If your search only involves one or two words, the basic search is fine, but we recommend using the “Advanced Search” or “Multi-Field Search” options. Advanced Search allows you to enter your search words one at a time and then tell the database how you want it to combine them. Multi-field search allows you to put in all your words at once.
Advanced search is the default option, and is how the database is designed to work. To use this, search for one concept at a time:
For example, at the time of writing, a search for breech finds 2178 items and a search for twins finds 5204. When combined together, Maternity and Infant Care finds 180 articles which match.
Multi-field search provides three boxes for search words. It is a faster way to search, and will often retrieve more articles, but may not be as accurate. This allows you to search for multiple concepts simultaneously:
Narrowing your search
Once you search, you can narrow the selection down using options in the left-hand column. The most useful ones are “Years”, to select the date, and “Publication Type” which allows you to narrow the results down to particular types of information such as Guidelines or particular types of research.
Each item will have an abstract you can read, which will highlight the words you searched for. If you decide you’d like to read the whole thing, there may be a web link (for news items, for instance) or for journal articles there will be a “Full Text Finder” link which will check to see whether we have the article available through our online library.
See the video further down this page for a brief demonstration of the use of this database.
The database platform does not have a dedicated accessibility information page.
If you wish to read an abstract when you are using a screen reader on Maternity and Infant Care, the site works best if you select the “View Abstract” button rather than the “Abstract Reference” link. You can also click the title of the relevant article, which brings up a much more detailed page.
Your Learning and Research Librarian will be able to help you make the best use of online resources. For detailed guidance, book a tutorial via the Learning Skills Hub.
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