Drug Name

You can search for a drug by any name that is known to you, such as a generic name, proprietary name, laboratory code, or chemical name: for example claritin, loratadine or sch 29851. Synonyms are automatically mapped to Emtree preferred terms, as in Advanced Search with Map to preferred terms selected: e.g. valium is mapped to the preferred term ‘diazepam’. However, in Drug Search (in contrast to Advanced Search), drug names are always mapped; this cannot be switched off.

Many drug names have non-alphanumeric characters such as apostrophes ( ' ), brackets ( ), square brackets [ ], hyphens (-), periods (.) and commas (,). A typical example is the serotonin agonist 1 (1,4 benzodioxan 5 yl) 4 [2 (1 indanyl)ethyl]piperazine. Use the keyboard characters in the following table to search these drug names as phrases or exact searches (between quotes), using the keyboard characters shown below:

Non-alphanumeric character
Keyboard character

Apostrophe ( ' )
Grave accent ( ` )

Brackets ( )
Brackets ( )

Square brackets [ ]
Brackets ( )

Hyphen (-)
Hyphen (-) or space

Period (.)
Period (.) or space

Comma (,)
Comma (,) or space

Colon (:)
(Not used in Emtree)

Note: square brackets [ ], quotes ( ' ) and colons (:) cannot be used in phrase searches since they are reserved characters with special functions in Embase search syntax.