Health Insurance Literature Database:
Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the Health Insurance Literature Database (HILD)?
The HILD is a database whose components are research that relates to who has and who does not have health insurance and the causes and consequences of having and not having health insurance.

2. What is the scope of ERIU's HILD?
It includes both the range of peer-reviewed work that appears in larger databases of scholarly literature as well as much work that either has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed format or will never appear in such a setting (e.g., reports prepared by think tanks, issue and policy briefs, etc.)

3. What are the comparative advantages of ERIU's HILD?
First, its scope is broader than bibliographic databases. Second, it has several fields that are not often found in literature databases: data set used; statistical methods. Thus HILD can be used, for example, to find studies on health insurance that have used the National Health Interview Study.

4. What is HILD's scope?
ERIU staff conduct regular searches of two databases: EconLit and Medline. In these searches, keywords are "uninsured", "health insurance", and "insurance status". Our last search was December, 2007. In addition, ERIU graduate research assistants review several web sites for research results that would not be found in the two databases of published research. These include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Academy Health, and The Kaiser Family Foundation.

5. Where do the abstracts in HILD come from?
When available, abstracts are copied from the source article. When abstracts are not provided in the source, ERIU graduate research assistants draft a short abstract from the executive summary or opening of the work.

6. The interface allows for two types of search: General Search and Advanced Search. How does General Search work?
The general search applies to the author, title, journal, publisher, and key word fields. General search identifies all items that include the sequence designated in the search. For example, typing "will" in the search field produces a query that returns all items that contain William, Willis, and unwilling.

7. Are the keywords chosen from a predetermined list?
No, the HILD does not employ a controlled vocabulary list. Keywords are taken directly from items entered in the database. If the item does not provide a list of keywords, an ERIU graduate research assistant uses the article abstract to generate key words.