Similar to MEDLINE (PubMed), EMBASE (owned by Elsevier) is a biomedical database that indexes over 8600 journals from around the World and adds controlled vocabulary or index terms to all of its article citations. Unlike MEDLINE, however, EMBASE also indexes conference proceedings from over 5600 conferences and it uses the Emtree thesaurus instead of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings).

One of the major differences between MeSH and Emtree is in their handling of drug/pharmaceutical concepts. That said, each of these services has expanded their indexing (and search capabilities) over the years so that the drugs are no longer simply classified (and retrieved) in terms of their chemical compound’s makeup.

In the case of MEDLINE – since 1996, indexers have been adding “the appropriate pharmacological action MeSH heading as well as the specific chemical MeSH heading to a citation when the action of the chemical is being discussed in the article”. In 2003, PubMed incorporated the ability to search using Pharmacological Action (PA) terms and in 2007, expanded the list of PA terms. The full list of items in Pharmacological Actions Category can be viewed (and added to the PubMed search builder form) from within the MeSH Browser.

EMBASE, on the other hand, has implemented an approach it calls “triple linking” (ie. three levels of indexing) where an article citation is indexed with an Emtree term (Drug, Device, or Disease), a key subheading (Emtree has about 17 of these concept qualifiers related to drugs), and a linked term (could be a specific adverse event or a drug-induced medical condition, etc). A single search string can be developed to query EMBASE using these multiple search parameters or by using EMBASE’s search filters.

Feel free to Ask Us if you have any questions or would like assistance searching on drug adverse events.