BU Library: Faculty Overview of Evidence Informed Practice (EIP): c. Embase

Embase Quick User Guide

Embase Quick User Guide Basic and advanced tips. Look for the type of search such as Disease, and follow the steps.

Embase Search Example

Scenario: One of your patients, with a body mass index (BMI) in the overweight range but without abnormal markers for diabetes, has asked you whether a low fat diet is better than a low carbohydrate diet for losing weight.

Notes:

Embase is an international clinical research database, originally developed in Amsterdam. It rivals PubMed in scope and offers good coverage of natural medicine; it currently indexes >2,000 journals not also indexed by Medline (PubMed), and offers >60,000 unique RCTs. Embase searches Medline too, and its subject thesaurus, Emtree, includes Medline's MeSH terms.

Check out the other tabs in this box to see PICO and searching in action!

1st: Identify PICO elements as specifically as possible:

Patient Population (or Problem)	Intervention (or Exposure)	Comparison (if known)	Outcome Measure(s)
overweight middle aged adults	low fat diet	low carbohydrate diet	sustained weight loss; improved QOL measures on a validated instrument

2nd: Frame your clinical question using elements from your PICO:

Q. Is a low fat diet more effective for weight loss than a low carbohydrate diet in overweight middle age adults?

Embase search query:

overweight AND 'low fat diet' AND 'low carbohydrate diet' NOT 'diabetes mellitus'

Filters applied: Article (Publication type); 2008-2012 (Publication Year)

Explanation of search query:

The best database searches are combinations of logical keywords and subject headings.

Keywords: overweight

EMTREE terms (Embase subject headings plus MeSH): low fat diet; low carbohydrate diet; diabetes mellitus

Note: obesity is an Emtree term, but the more general term, overweight, may be better for the patient's context.

In Embase, always use single or double quotes around ALL phrases (this includes Emtree subject terms and keyword phrases). If this search had included both AND and OR, parentheses would be necessary as well. (See PubMed and CINAHL search examples for an explanation of how parentheses function in a search.)

Filters/Limits: Run searches from the Advanced Search page for full filtering options; fyi for future Embase searches, Male and Female are Emtree terms—you can AND them into your search, if necessary.