Embase Online Help

You can begin your search immediately using the Quick Search form on the home page or you can access the other specialized search forms in Embase. Alternatively you can choose any section from the options on the top menu bar: Search, Emtree Tool, Journals, Authors, Help, or Profile. You can also login using the Login bar in the upper-right part of the screen.

Note: if you are outside your institution IP range, you will first be directed to log on page before accessing Embase Home page. For more information on remote access, please see Login section.

Search Forms

Search is the core of Embase. All search forms are designed to allow you to look for biomedical and pharmaceutical clinical and research information easily and quickly, whether you are a new or experienced searcher. The Embase search engine allows Boolean searching with wildcard and truncation features, as well as many predefined search limits.

Search is divided into six main forms: Quick Search, Advanced Search, Drug Search, Disease Search, Article Search and Field Search. Quick Search lets you perform easy yet powerful searches without having to learn a complex search language. Advanced Search incorporates options from Emtree term mapping including explosion searching for maximum precision in subject searching (see Emtree Tool). Drug Search and Disease Search provide access to specialized features useful to search these topics, and Article Search allows you to pinpoint individual articles.

Please refer to Search Hints section for detailed information on search syntax.

Emtree Tool

Emtree Tool is at the heart of subject searching in Embase, and allows you to control your search by offering both comprehensiveness and search precision, depending on your needs. Emtree is a hierarchical subject thesaurus of over 54,000 preferred terms at all levels of specificity, supplemented by nearly 210,000 synonyms.

You can scan Emtree for suitable terms by browsing within subject categories (trees), or directly type in terms of interest in the Emtree tool page to find the best individual terms for your search. For the most comprehensive results, you can 'explode' the trees to include narrower (more specific) concepts. For example, by exploding heart disease, you simultaneously search angina pectoris, cardiopulmonary arrest, heart aneurysm, tachycardia, and more. For more focused searches using drug and disease terms, you can use Drug Subheading or Disease Subheading 'filters' (e.g. drug therapy or diagnosis) to refine your strategy and pinpoint the most relevant articles.