Research Guides: Graphic Medicine: Finding the Literature

Finding the Literature: Recommended Databases

In addition to the graphic novels themselves, there's also a growing body of literature analyzing, critiquing, and discussing graphic medicine in the context of medical education, patient experiences, and much more. There are scholars in the field collecting and highlighting graphic medicine scholarship:

Scott McCloud's TED talk, Understanding Comics, is a brief overview of his work and comic studies.

Open-Access Journal

Graphic Medicine Review
The Graphic Medicine Review (GMR) publishes scholarly works relevant to both the comics medium (aka comic books, graphic novels, manga, bande desinée, etc.) and healthcare, medicine, wellness, patient experience, and public health policy. GMR is an open-access resource primarily produced in English but international in scope and concerns.

Books on Comics

Comics and Critical Librarianship: Reframing the Narrative in Academic Libraries

Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives

Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage

Gender, Eating Disorders, and Graphic Medicine

Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory

Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities

Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness

The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human

Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability

Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives

Who Understands Comics? Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension

Start your exploration of these scholarly conversations in these databases

MCPHS Smart Search
Use Smart Search to search across almost all our databases and collections at once.

PubMed (MCPHS link)
Provided by the National Library of Medicine, this free database includes access to Medline, citations to other life sciences journals not indexed in Medline (primarily general sciences and chemistry), and links to the molecular biology databases maintained by National Center for Biotechnology Center (NCBI).
Scopus
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature with more than 20,500 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers. Scopus offers researchers a quick, easy and comprehensive resource to support their research needs in the scientific, technical, medical and social sciences fields and arts and humanities.
Pop Culture Studies (Gale OneFile)
This collection provides useful information for any researcher in a social science, history, art or liberal arts course. This collection is made up of more than 100 subject-appropriate full-text periodicals.
*Currently available only to people located in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, but not being recognized as someone who should have access? Try turning on the "Share your location" feature.
Google Scholar (MCPHS Link)
Access our electronic journals through links in the Google Scholar search results pages from both on-campus and off-campus. Click the Get Full Text (MCPHS) button to see if we have the full-text article or you can request it through interlibrary loan.
CINAHL with Full Text
Literature related to nursing and allied health; also consumer health, biomedicine, and health sciences librarianship; indexes over 2900 journals; also provides access to healthcare books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of professional practice, educational software and AV materials in nursing, the Pre-CINAHL dataset, and more.

A-Z List of Databases
This is the full list of MCPHS's databases - you can browse alphabetically, or search by subject or database title.

Browse these journals

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship
This journal aims to make original contributions to the field of comic’s studies and to advance the appreciation of graphic narrative.
European Comic Art
Devoted to the study of European-language graphic novels, comic strips, comic books and caricature.