By Roxanne Cox

Embase has a new and easy to use quick search form with multiple search lines that let you restrict your search to specific fields, such as title, journal name, country of journal, country of author, conference name and many other useful fields.  The new search form easily allows limiting retrieval to evidence based medicine with limits to Cochrane Reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analysis, randomized control trial or controlled clinical trial.

Embase covers the international biomedical literature from 8500 peer-reviewed journals from 1947 to the present.  Over 30% of the journals covered are unique and not covered by PubMed/Medline.

By Roxanne Cox

A new PICO search feature enables a more evidence-based approach to literature searching by clearly separating a clinical question into the 4 elements of a PICO search (Patient, Intervention, Comparison/Control and Outcome). The new PICO search form will automatically combine search terms within each element and between each element using the correct Boolean operators (OR and AND, respectively).

The PICO search form also lets you browse the Emtree thesaurus without leaving the page—see where terms fit within the Emtree hierarchy and read information, such as Dorland’s definitions, without needing to toggle back and forth to ‘Browse Emtree’. Once the Emtree term is added to the search query, you can quickly select the synonyms to add to the search query in a single step, significantly speeding up the process of building comprehensive searches.

Access Embase from the library’s homepage under Literature Databases.