What does CAM stand for?
CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) includes: Herbal medicine, relaxation, acupuncture, Qi Gong, Ayurveda, naturopathy, yoga and massage, osteopathy, homeopathy etc. and is the umbrella term for a variety of recognized and proven methods of the integrative medical care landscape, which have become increasingly popular in science and practice.
What is CAMbase?
CAMbase is a project funded by foundations for the purpose of realizing a systematic overview of the relevant literature in the field of CAM.
How does CAMbase work?
With the help of a Solr-based retrieval system, the user is able to do multilingual, intuitive, natural language research. Searching in CAMbase therefore does not require any knowledge of classic retrieval techniques (boolean connections or truncations), so that the search is considerably simplified even for non-database specialists.
Based on an integrated stemming algorithm, entries are reduced to their word stem. As a result, the user's search query is interpreted syntactically and semantically in a simplified manner. The search results thus achieve a higher hit rate than with conventional retrieval systems and are of better quality. The results are also hierarchically structured and thus presented more user-friendly.
What does CAMbase contain?
CAMbase currently contains more than 113,000 bibliographical entries (scientific journal articles and book contributions in German and English).
Which bibliographical data does CAMbase provide?
In general, the author(s), title, name of the journal / book, page number, keywords as well as abstracts or short summaries (if available) are given.
Does CAMbase deliver full text articles?
No.
Do I have to pay fees for using CAMbase?
CAMbase is a free database you may use to gain information on CAM without additional costs.
Who uses CAMbase?
CAMbase was originally set up for scientists in the field of anthroposophic medicine, complementary medicine and homeopathy. Interested laypeople also use CAMbase.
Who maintains CAMbase?
CAMbase is a project of the Chair for Medical Theory, Integrative and Anthroposophic Medicine at the Witten/Herdecke University. Ms. Christa Raak is your contact person for the coordination and further development of CAMbase.
Who is affiliated to CAMbase?
The following sponsors are currently members of the CAMbase network:
Where can I get more information about CAMbase?
Raak C, Ostermann T. Fachbibliotheken und Literaturdatenbanken als Quellen der Evidenz in der Integrativen Medizin. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Onkologie 2018; 50:77-81
Boehm K, Raak C, Vollmar HC, Ostermann T. An overview of 45 published database resources for complementary and alternative medicine. Health Info Libr J. 2010 Jun;27(2):93-105
Ostermann T, Raak CK, Matthiessen PF, Büssing A, Zillmann H. Linguistic processing and classification of semi structured bibliographic data on complementary medicine. Cancer Inform. 2009 Jul 6;7:159-69
Ostermann T, Zillmann H, Raak CK, Buessing A, Matthiessen PF. CAMbase--a XML-based bibliographical database on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Biomed Digit Libr. 2007 Apr 3;4:2
Who does engage in CAM in Germany?
In the course of the last two decades an increasing number of research initiatives has come into existence under the terms of "Complementary Medicine" or "Complementary and Alternative Medicine" in Germany. These research groups managed to establish themselves at university institutions which is described in:
Ostermann T., Brinkhaus, B. Melchart, C.: Das Forum universitärer Arbeitsgruppen für Naturheilverfahren und Komplementärmedizin. Forsch Komplementärmed 1999; 6: 41-42