DHARA: Your Digital Bridge to Ayurveda Research
DHARA is the acronym for Digital Helpline for Ayurveda Research Articles. It is the first comprehensive online indexing service exclusively for research articles published in the field of Ayurveda.
With an evolutionary history that spans several thousands of years, Ayurveda is one of the oldest and meticulously codified systems of health care in the world.
However, in modern times, the Ayurvedic community has lagged behind in the task of projecting Ayurveda as an evidence-based system with adequate research support to vouchsafe its therapeutic claims of safety and efficacy. For this reason, Ayurveda has not been able to position itself in an advantageous manner in spite of the growing interest and prevalence of Complementary and Alternative Medicine world over.
A lot of research that happens in Ayurveda languish in the form of unpublished theses submissions or dissertations. Most of what gets published remain inaccessible because they are published in journals in regional languages or other India journals that are not indexed in international databases, such as PubMed. DHARA is the first systematic and comprehensive initiative to fill this gap.
At this point of time, DHARA has indexed research articles on Ayurveda that have been published in more than 4100 journals worldwide. The total number of indexed articles exceed 52,000. Care has been taken to exclude publications that would not qualify as research journals, such as magazines and souvenirs. However, research journals which have not disclosed their editorial policies in the field of Ayurveda have also been included due to paucity of research publications dealing exclusively with Ayurveda. These journals also publish high-quality articles occasionally.
How does this work?
The simple way to search for information in DHARA is to just type the keyword in the search field. The search field is displayed prominently on all pages and will fetch all information related to the keyword. The search results are displayed by default as article titles with author names sorted by the date of publication. On the right side, the search summary is given indicating how many articles are available for the search with breakup of titles, abstracts, and paid or free full text access. Keyword search has limitations because it may pull up information not directly relevant to the keyword. For example, if the search keyword is asthma, articles that do not deal directly with asthma, but have this word in the abstract will also be retrieved. On the other hand, keyword search may also fail to retrieve relevant information linked with synonyms of the search word. For example, keyword search for the term piles will fail to retrieve information linked with the term hemorrhoids. Advanced search options can help to overcome this problem.
DHARA: Your Digital Bridge to Ayurveda Research
DHARA is the acronym for Digital Helpline for Ayurveda Research Articles. It is the first comprehensive online indexing service exclusively for research articles published in the field of Ayurveda.
With an evolutionary history that spans several thousands of years, Ayurveda is one of the oldest and meticulously codified systems of health care in the world. However, in modern times, the Ayurvedic community has lagged behind in the task of projecting Ayurveda as an evidence-based system with adequate research support to vouchsafe its therapeutic claims of safety and efficacy. For this reason, Ayurveda has not been able to position itself in an advantageous manner in spite of the growing interest and prevalence of Complementary and Alternative Medicine world over. A lot of research that happens in Ayurveda languish in the form of unpublished theses submissions or dissertations. Most of what gets published remain inaccessible because they are published in journals in regional languages or other India journals that are not indexed in international databases, such as PubMed. DHARA is the first systematic and comprehensive initiative to fill this gap.
At this point of time, DHARA has indexed research articles on Ayurveda that have been published in more than 4100 journals worldwide. The total number of indexed articles exceed 52,000. Care has been taken to exclude publications that would not qualify as research journals, such as magazines and souvenirs. However, research journals which have not disclosed their editorial policies in the field of Ayurveda have also been included due to paucity of research publications dealing exclusively with Ayurveda. These journals also publish high-quality articles occasionally.