Strong research begins with an effective literature search. Below are a number of relevant journals that publish work germane to the field of simulation.
Clinical Simulation in Nursing
BMJ Simulation & Technology Enhanced Learning
Open Journal of Modeling and Simulation
International Journal of Modeling, Simulation, and Scientific Computing
Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory
Journal of Advanced Research in Modeling and Simulation
Often institutions have subscriptions to journals and can give you access to free PDF files. In addition, many journals open their material to the public after a certain period of time. It is thus both feasible and advisable to build an electronic library of literature relevant to your work. It can also be helpful to contact authors directly. Most are willing to share and are happy to hear that their work has been of use. Below is a list of databases that often link to full-text copies of the referenced articles.
Index Based Database
PubMed (free): a powerful database in the area of the life sciences
Google Scholar: a freely-accessible Web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
ISI Web of Science (by institution subscription): an online academic database provided by Thomson Scientific's Institute for Scientific Information
ScienceDirect: one of the largest online collections of published scientific research in the world. Produced by Elsevier, it contains over 9.6 million articles from over 2500 journals, over 6,000 e-books, reference works, book series and handbooks. (by institution subscription)
Scopus: the largest abstract and citation database. It covers over 16,500 titles from more than 4,000 international publishers, including coverage of 37 million records, of which: 18 million records include references going back to 1996 (75% include references) 19 million pre-1996 records go back as far as 1823. (by institution subscription)
EBSCO Provider of EBSCOhost®: the leading search platform for full-text online research databases in institutions worldwide. (by institution subscription)
HighWire Press: the largest archive of free full-text science on Earth! As of 7/8/09, we are assisting in the online publication of 1,918,831 free full-text articles and 6,062,314 total articles. There are 8 sites with free trial periods, and 47 completely free sites. 282 sites have free back issues, and 1181 sites have pay per view!
JSTOR (short for Journal Storage): a United States-based online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions.
Simulation Related
Medical Modeling and Simulation Database: focused on literature from the field beyond just medline.
PsychInfo: basically medline of psychological articles
ERIC: ERIC provides unlimited access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials, with hundreds of new records added twice weekly. If available, links to full text are included.