Emtree: The Life Science Thesaurus

Emtree is Elsevier’s Life Science Thesaurus. It is a hierarchically structured, controlled vocabulary for Biomedicine and related Life Sciences, and has been used to index Embase since 1947.

Find out more, including the benefits of using Emtree when searching in Embase, in the Emtree Fact Sheet 2011

From January 2011, Emtree contains all drug generic names described by the FDA and EMA, all International Non-Proprietary Names (INNs) described by WHO from 2000, and extended coverage of Trade Names described by many major pharmaceutical companies.

Also with effect from 2011, Emtree is updated three times each year, with backposting of older records to bring them in line with the current update. The mid-year updates (planned for implementation in May and September) include many new drug names as well as updates in coverage of trade names, WHO INNs and other drug lists as they become available. Important additions to disease and other concepts are also included. Lists are released as soon after the implementation date as possible.

Download a list of the terms added to Emtree in Jan 2011(released May 2011)
Download a list of terms added to Emtree in Sept 2011(released 24 September 2011)

Embase Indexing Guide 2012

We encourage you to check the Embase Indexing Guide 2012. This indexing guide describes the indexing policy for journals covered by Embase. Although not intended to be a practical search guide, it will help you formulate search queries and will give you some insight as to what results you can expect. In other words, this guide focuses not on How to search but on What to search. Download this document now from our Download Centre .