Drug

Drug Search provides many options for scanning the published drug and biochemical research literature.

The Drug Name search box lets you look for an individual drug or family (group) of related drugs or compounds, with either a generic (non-proprietary) name (e.g., loratadine or antihistaminic agent) or a specific product trade name (Claritin).

Menus for drug subheadings and specific routes of drug administration enable a high level precision in query building.  The qualifiers you select here are retrieved only when indexed directly to the drug(s) typed at the top of the search page, greatly minimizing the chance of irrelevant citations.

Notes

  • Mapping to preferred terminology is automatically enabled in Drug Search.  It cannot be de-selected.  This ensures that any drug name or group you type will be matched to its corresponding Emtree term immediately. 
  • If you want to search for a drug or chemical without mapping (e.g, only a specific trade name, and not every paper indexed with its generic name), choose Advanced Search and use whatever field labels or other qualifiers you need:

celebrex:tn

  • You can use Boolean operators to specify multiple drug names:

cisplatin or ‘doxorubicin iron’ or titanocene

  • If a wildcard is entered, mapping is disabled and free-text search is run instead.  Antihistimin* does not map to the Emtree term antihistiminic agent; instead, it finds antihistamine, antihistamines, antihistiminic, etc. in article titles, abstracts or other database fields in which the string occurs.

Very important:

Enclose multi-word phrases in quotation marks; they can be either single or double quotes, as long as they match each other.  This will ensure your phrase is searched as words adjacent to each other, in the order given.  For instance, ‘drug interaction’ retrieves:

5 fluorouracil (adverse drug reaction, drug interaction)

If quotes are omitted, the first word is mapped and subsequent words are searched free-text; all words are then combined with a Boolean AND operator, which can result in a large quantity of irrelevant results ("false hits"?), since the terms can occur at some distance apart from each other within a database record.  Drug interaction (without quotes) can result in:

"Halogens had equal propensities of interaction for the halogen bonding partners ..."? (in the abstract) and "disinfectant agent, drug, fluorine ..."? (in the indexing)