Searching EMBASE Janet West Principal Pharmacist Medicines Information Southern General Hospital NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde

What is EMBASE? Major biomedical & pharmaceutical database European focus Subject coverage focuses on human medicine – also includes related disciplines e.g health economics, hospital management What is EMBASE?

Background >11 million records 1974 onwards >5000 journals >70 countries ~580,000 records added annually ~80% records have author written abstract Background

EMBASE <> Medline EMBASE indexes more drug related literature EMBASE covers more European & Far Eastern journals Medline covers more US journals EMBASE is updated faster – average = working days for full article to appear c.f. 6-8 weeks for Medline (30% within 30 days, 60% within 60 days) Overlap between Medline & Embase = ~30% therefore always search both Medline vs EMBASE

Make your EMBASE searches effective..

Searching EMBASE Controlled vocabulary = EMTREE Uses natural language e.g. chronic fatigue syndrome [EMBASE] v fatigue syndrome, chronic [Medline] US spellings rather than British e.g. estrogen rather than oestrogen INNs used where possible Acronyms & abbreviations mostly avoided

Hierarchical tree consisting of: EMTREE is divided into 15 facets (A  Q) Largest = facet C & facet D C = physical diseases, disorders and abnormalities D = chemicals and drugs (21,000 terms) EMTREE

‘Explode’ and ‘major’ ~20 descriptive terms applied to each record (sometimes many more) 3 – 5 are given importance (major) Searching EMBASE

Dialog NHS interface: – Type in words and map to thesaurus or – Use browse function or – Enter the term Searching EMBASE EMBASE

Many more subheading options for drugs compared with Medline e.g. diclofenac Using subheadings EMBASE

Must check when a term was added (in scope note – yellow post-it note) May need to search free text as well to pick up articles before the entry date of that term with these words in e.g. grapefruit juice NB - CARE as may not be a topic of the article Check date term was added

Free text searches also useful when:- – there is no appropriate match in the EMTREE thesaurus for your term, – the concept is very new to the literature, or – the concept has a very specific name, such as ‘Waterlow Score’ Free Text

Drug / device trade names can be searched Articles are indexed with trade names when relevant Useful when searching for comparative info e.g. Slophyllin, Uniphyllin Trade name searching

No real need to do this in EMBASE However it is still possible to do – see drop down menu All medicines have EMTREE terms – even recently licensed ones (as far as I can tell!) e.g. duloxetine, rasagiline etc CAS number searching

Limit searches in similar way to Medline Two ways of limiting Less publication type limit options (but see next slide), less age limit options EMBASE limits

Publication types have their own facet / tree top of EMTREE terms that are searchable Facet J: types of article or study Build up your search and combine in the usual way (using BOOLEAN) with other search terms Publication types

Are there any papers about SSRIs or SNRIs being used in the treatment of Huntington disease? Worked example 1

Are there any articles which discuss using high dose vitamin supplementation to treat autistic disorders ? Worked example 2 EMBASE

Any questions?