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Last Update
28 April 2013
Introduction
Interfaces
Coverage
See also Embase Indexing Guide: a comprehensive guide to Embase indexing policy
Embase - also known by its former, pre-online era name, the Excerpta Medica database - is a key biomedical and pharmacological database with more than 24 million records from 1974 to present, indexed from 5,000+ journals from 70 countries. Embase is known as a complement to Medline, and for its strength in pharmaceutical information and European content.
- Over 1,000,000 citations and abstracts are added to Embase annually
- 80% of all citations in EMBASE include author-written abstracts
- The 2012 EMTREE thesaurus includes 60,000 preferred terms (more than 30,000 are drugs and chemicals)
- 260,000 synonyms (over 172,000 of which are drugs and chemicals)
- 7,500 explosion terms (that define the hierarchical structure)
- 78 subheadings (64 drug subheadings and 14 disease subheadings)
- 14 study types including Randomized Controlled Trial, Systematic Review and Diagnostic Test Accuracy Study
- Links to over 21,000 CAS registry numbers
- All MeSH terms are included
- Drug indexing by trade name, manufacturer name, clinical trials, all new International Non-Proprietary Names (INNs) for drugs registered with the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as all US Adopted Names and NDAs (New Drug Approvals) listed by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA)
- Trade names belonging to major pharmaceutical companies are also covered.
EMBASE® is available via OvidSP and fully-indexed with complete author abstracts twenty days after receipt of content. Some abstracts are available via Scirus and Google scholar. Embase records contain full bibliographic information, controlled terms and codes.
Searchability
Embase, produced by Elsevier, is a useful biomedical database for topics such as drugs, pharmacology, toxicology, clinical and experimental medicine, health policy and management, public and occupational health, drug dependence and abuse, psychiatry, forensic medicine, and biomedical engineering/instrumentation.
- What are its strengths? drug research, pharmacology and toxicology.
- Embase has stronger psychiatry coverage compared to Medline.
- 35-50% overlap with Medline, but Embase has a European rather than an American bias.
- Anglo-centric terms and phrases are more common.
- Embase includes literature as far back as 1974; updated monthly and searchable on OvidSP interface.
References
See also
