Frequently Asked Questions

Pharmaceutical Industry

Biotechnology Companies

Medical Device companies

Medical and Pharmacy University/Schools (specifically in areas related to Evidence Based Medicine)

Embase has a strong drug coverage and you risk missing vital information if you do not include Embase in your searches. See the drug table (link), which compares the number of citations found in Embase and PubMed for the top 10 selling drugs in 2007. Embase allows you to add specific subheadings to your drugs and easily review all reported side effects for example, without always having to consult the full text.

Are you searching biomedical information? Then you will need Embase as well as Scopus. Scopusis an all-science database, and as such includes all the content of Embase, including index terms.

Scopus does not, however, include the Emtree thesaurus or allow hierarchical (thesaurus-based) searches; and it also lacks the subheadings (biomedical limits) which allow focused searches for specific drug and disease concepts such as adverse events, clinical trials and therapy. Try searching for depression in Scopus for example and you retrieve results looking at economic and meterological depression, not so in Embase. What about a comprehensive search for ‘heart attack’ as a side effect of rofecoxib. Your search in Scopus will find all records with ‘heart attack’ but not records using ‘cardiac infarction’ or the Emtree generic term ‘heart infarction’.

Please refer to the Embase Classic page on our info site for information.

The main difference is the content. Pharmapendium uniquely covers FDA approval packages, whereas Embase covers journal content. Each product currently uses a different thesaurus for indexing, but we are looking into combining these into a single thesaurus. Integration between Pharmapendium and Embase will be looked at in 2010.

The Embase product team are always keen to speak with customers and hear their feedback. Please contact us if you would like to be involved more closely.

Please use the ‘forget your password’ link from the Log in box (click on Log in from the top right of every screen to access this box) and your password will be sent to you. If you have forgotten your username, please contact your regional help desk.

Please refer to the Embase Indexing Guide for a list of publication types.

ou can check the definition in the helpfiles. Conference abstracts and Conference Reviews were added to Embase in 2009 and are taken from journal supplements. Conference papers have been in Embase since 1997 and are published data from a conference and part of the journal content.

Since 2009, conferences abstracts are added to Embase with title and abstract indexed. Please see the coverage page for an up to date list of all conferences covered in Embase.

Please refer to the Embase Indexing Guide for a list of publication types.

Yes, please see the study types above. Embase offers more EBM content than searching Medline alone, Randomised Controlled Trials and Controlled Clinical Trials for example. Please see a presentation given by Carol Lefebvre at MLA 2010 for more information.

Only Embase journals (this is not MEDLINE): The policy moved to cover to cover over a series of steps:

• In 1980, a core stream of journals (later known as 'priority journals') were introduced and they were cover to cover. The remaining Embase journal collection were not consistently cover to cover at this time.
• During the 1980's, the selected journals were reduced and cover to cover gradually extended to all journals, apart from the 'drugs-only' journals. The 'drugs-only' journals (around 600) were selectively covered for drugs only articles.
• From around 2003, cover to cover was extended to include the 'drugs-only' journals and all letters, editorials and notes.

Only MEDLINE journals: The MEDLINE policy has always been to cover literature as it is and they select at the journal level, which differs to Embase, which selected at the article level for some years.  There is an important exception, for journals such as Science and Nature, non-biomedical articles are not covered by Medline but are indexed by Embase. They are, however covered by Pubmed with status, 'Pubmed-not-MEDLINE'. As highlighted in other FAQs and Embase related documents, you cannot perform a comprehensive biomedical search with only Embase or MEDLINE. You need both to be sure. 

Embase and MEDLINE (combined as in www.embase.com): Journals are cover to cover from 1966 onwards (MEDLINE covering where Embase was not cover to cover) with some exceptions, such as marginal non-life science topics (general science and chemistry for example), especially in earlier years. See Pubmed Help for more information.

Veterinary Medicine, Dentistry, and Nursing. Please refer to the coverage page of the info site for journal lists.

• 51% from Western Europe (41% in MEDLINE)
• 30% from North America (44% in MEDLINE)
• 5% from Asia (3% in MEDLINE)
• 4% from Eastern Europe (4% in MEDLINE)
• 3% from Japan (3% in MEDLINE)
• 2% from Middle East (1% in MEDLINE)
• 2% from Central and South America (1% in MEDLINE)
• 2% from Australia and New Zealand (2% in MEDLINE)
• 1% from Africa (1% in MEDLINE)

Embase has more than 22 million records (excluding Embase Classic), of which almost 13 million are derived from Embase.

Excluding Embase Classic, about 60% of Embase records (12m out of 22m records, 1966-present) have abstracts. For Embase records (i.e. excluding MEDLINE unique records), the percentage is 75% (9.2m/12.9m). For records added in the last 10 years, the percentage is 80% (4.3m/5.3m).

The reason that 20% of recent Embase records lack abstracts is that Embase (like MEDLINE) only includes author abstracts. The source literature, however, includes many items without abstracts, such as most letters, editorials and notes; and even some reviews and short surveys. Overall, records identified with the Publication type "Article" (70% of all items) have 95% abstracts in the last 10 years.

Full indexing for Embase (excluding unique MEDLINE) is a manual process based on the full text of the article. It is done by trained indexers with a biomedical background. Biomedical terms identified by indexers are controlled against Emtree before being added to records online. The entire process (including data input of Citation and Abstract) takes on average two weeks from receipt of the journal issue.

For unique MEDLINE records, index terms assigned by the NLM (which are controlled via the MeSH thesaurus) are mapped to EMTREE terms - making use of the fact that all MeSH terms are included within EMTREE. Please refer to the Embase Indexing Guide for more information.

Embase indexing (based on article full text, and using well-defined guidelines) enables consistent and comprehensive retrieval of biomedical information; control of index terms using Emtree ensures that concepts are mapped to the preferred terminology. Without such indexing, searches would be limited to uncontrolled words and phrases in the title and abstract only.

• Medical terms, defined as all terms other than drugs and chemicals. Medical terms are classified in EMTREE into 14 facets, from Anatomy, Organisms and Diseases through to Geographic names and Health care concepts.
• Drug terms (from which CAS registry numbers are generated)
• Drug trade names and manufacturers
• Device trade names and manufacturers
• Molecular Sequence Numbers

Please refer to the Embase Indexing Guide for more information.

Full indexing is done by trained indexers with a biomedical background. Indexing is supported by computer-generation of proposed index terms, where appropriate; but indexers retain control of the final index.

Articles in Press, In Process and conference abstracts are automatically indexed.

Please refer to the Emtree page on our info site for information.

Emtree is currently updated once a year. Please contact us if you have any Emtree suggestions or changes.

New terms, this is terms not yet in Emtree are called candidates and depending on frequency of occurrence in the literature, are added to the next Emtree update. At the moment, they are generated from the full text when indexing. If a term is not used frequently enough or is for any reason not suitable as a candidate term, it will not make it to an EMTREE term. However, most drug trade names will become EMTREE terms, either as a synonym or as a preferred term if no more suitable preferred term is available.

History indicates the year in which the term became an official EMTREE term. It may be used in Embase before this date, as a candidate term and so the indexers will index records with this term.

In 2007, indexers began indexing an additional link between the drug and disease for ‘Drug comparison’, ‘Drug combination’, ‘Drug Interaction’ and ‘Adverse Drug Reaction’. We started doing this for ‘Drug Therapy’ in 2009. In 2009, we were able to display this in Embase and so now when you click on the drug (in Preview Index Terms or when viewing the record), if the record was indexed since 2007, ‘Adverse Drug Reaction’ will be seen as a key subheading, with additional information, in this case the side effects. Before this time, ‘Adverse Drug Reaction’ will be displayed in Other Subheadings.

They are converted to EMTREE index terms. This is possible, because all MeSH terms are included in EMTREE (sometimes as synonyms).

Articles in Press and Conference Abstracts are indexed with Emtree and so they may retrieved in your search by typing in one or more synonyms or an explosion term, this is the advantages of Emtree-aided searching. Subheadings, drug/device trade names & manufacturers, molecular sequence numbers and CAS numbers are not indexed. Journal articles are fully indexed and so include the extra indexing mentioned above. Therefore, indexing for an AIP may change when it is published (if published) and fully indexed in Embase.

The scope notes are available in Emtree for check tags (study types, age groups etc) and subheadings (Adverse Drug Reaction, Drug Therapy, Drug Comparison, Side Effect etc). They provide a definition of the use of these indexing terms by our indexers.

Embase indexing policy for non-English items that have an English title and an English abstract:

The English title and English abstract are used for indexing. Other English information in a non-English item (such as keywords, information in tables)are not used for indexing.

Embase indexing policy for non-English items that only have an English title:

If there is only an English title, indexing is based exclusively on this title. If the English title makes no sense, the full text is checked to find at least one suitable index term but not more than three and links are not added.

The main criterion for the current interface was to appeal to end users. We have found over time that there has been room for improvement, and we have spent the last few months of 2008 interviewing current and potential users, in order to understand better what they are looking for in a search platform.

We began to implement these changes as soon as we moved to the new search engine at the end of May, 2009. The first major interface release was in November 2009 and this work will continue in 2010. Please refer to our news section to stay up to date or follow us on Twitter.

Please refer to the Search Hints section of the help files for more information. Operators, truncation etc may be used in all search forms, including Quick Search.

Each search form offers different options for searching. Quick search offers autocomplete, which guides you to the best term to use for your search. Advanced Search offers more limit options then Quick Search, so you may define your search. Drug and disease search forms offer the same limit options as Advanced Search and in addition, allow you to limit to specific drug and disease concepts. Generally speaking, Quick Search is designed for initial research as it is a broad search, Drug search for drug searches, Disease Search for disease searches (use Combine on the Search Results page to combine your drug and disease searches) and Advanced Search for non-drug and disease searches.

Article search allows you to retrieve a specific article using ISSN and Coden for example.

There are many limits from Quick Limits to Advanced Limits on the Search forms. When in the Search Results page, you may use the Refine feature to limit to publication types and year for example. You may also click on Edit to go back to the Search Forms to further refine your search.

This is not available in Embase. We are investigating this for a future release.

We do not use Stop Words as found in Pubmed.

Yes, you can. You can e-mail results, as Bibliographic citation, to up to an unlimited amount of e-mail addresses. However, to view the abstract your colleagues will need a subscription to EMBASE.com.

The following options are offered, per day, every 2 weeks, every month, every 2 months, every 3 months, every 6 months or every year. Users may also select which day of the week on which they would like to receive their email alerts. Please ask users to refer to the helpfiles for more imformation (add link when ready).

Customers have an option to include AIP/Embase In-Process when setting up their email alerts. This is represented as a check box at the bottom of the email alert set up window. Due to the automatic indexing of AIP and Embase In-Process, records may be retrieved using index terms. The same record may then appear again, as an email alert, when the same record is uploaded as a fully indexed record.

If I want to export/download my search results which formats are offered by Embase?

You can download your search result with EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, CSV fields by row, CSV fields by column, or as Plain Text (citations only, citation and abstract only, short record or full record).

We will not delete anything from saved alerts, clipboard and searches. They will remain active as long as the customer account is valid. However, if for any reason the USER account is deleted (by librarians request for example) everything in this profile will be deleted as well.

Yes, the RSS link may be found alongside the email alert link to the right of each session result.

Yes, all Embase users can set up alerts once they register (click on register at the top of any Embase screen) with a username and password. When setting up alerts they may choose the day they wish to receive the alerts and also the frequency of the alerts.

During the past 10 years, approximately 80% of the records have full-text links.

Embase currently deliver full-text links to ScienceDirect, Karger Online Journals and Springer-Link.

Articles from more than 100 additional publishers are available through CrossRef. And further links are offered through 'Ingenta Select'.

Yes, it is. If you would like to set up resolved linking, please contact your regional help desk.

A subscription to Embase can be invoiced in all major currencies, this is US Dollars, EURO, Pound Sterling & Japanese Jen.

Based on financial rules the chosen currency for your customer will be the currency of the company site that signs the Embase subscription license. If for example the license is signed by your US officials the invoice will be in US Dollars.

Yes, institutions may request a trial and the standard is one month. Please contact your regional help desk or Elsevier Account Manager to request a trial.

You may trial Embase as an individual if representing an institution. We do not offer individual licences at this time.

Pricing is based on the number of biomedical users and is at this time only available for institutional access, this is not individual access. Please use the contact form on the info site if you would like help in finding out about the possibilities of Embase at your institution. If you would like to find out about institutional pricing, please contact your regional help desk.

Once we have your contact details, usage stats are sent automatically on the first day of the month. You will receive a report outlining the number of sessions, the number of searches and the types of searches (quick, advanced, EMTREE, author, journal) year to date, month by month. Please contact your regional helpdesk to set up a usage report.