Refining your Search

Too many hits? If your search results do not match your expectations, try these suggestions for refining your retrieval.

Quick Search (and most other search forms)

  • Add additional terms to the search statement, combined with the Boolean AND operator.
  • Disable Extensive Search.
  • Limit to recent publication years, or a more specific time-frame.
  • Limit to English language (or other appropriate languages).
  • Limit to records with abstracts, eliminating most letters, notes, errata, etc.
  • Restrict to priority journals.
  • In Search Results, sort your hits according to Relevance to bring the most relevant results to the top of your list.

Advanced Search

  • Restrict your search terms to specific data fields (title, abstract, etc.), rather than searching all fields.
  • Disable Map to preferred terminology to search only the word / phrase you have typed, without mapping it to Emtree terminology.
  • Disable Include sub-terms/derivatives (explosion search) to retrieve only individual terms, with including narrower ones.
  • Select Search terms must be of major focus to limit hits to articles where your term is the key point of a paper, rather than merely an implied or peripheral concept.
  • Rather than searching all of Embase, choose Records from: to pull results from a specific portion of the database: Embase (1974 to present), Unique Medline or Embase Classic (1947-73).
  • Using More Limits, choose any additional qualifiers that may be appropriate: Evidence-based medicine, Publication types, Age groups, Areas of focus, etc.

Drug or Disease Search

  • Consider using drug or disease subheadings to increase specifity and limit your search set to 1988 to present.
  • Add Routes of drug adminstration in drug search; limits output to year 2000 onward.

Not enough hits? If your search results do not match your expectations, try these suggestions for expanding your search.

Quick Search (and most other search forms)

  • Make sure Extensive Search is on, so that term mapping, explosion and free-text searching are all enabled.
  • Add additional search terms with the Boolean OR operator.
  • Do a quick free-text search, identify likely-looking articles by scanning the resulting titles, then examine the indexing of promising records to identify some potentially fruitful index terms.
  • Search all fields, rather than limiting to article title, abstract, etc.
  • Truncate your free-text terms with wildcards to broaden their reach.

Advanced Search

  • Select Map to preferred terminology to use the preferred Emtree term for your subject and include records indexed with it.
  • Check Include sub-terms/derivatives (explosion search) to retrieve all relevant narrower terms, for a more inclusive search.
  • Check on Search also for synonyms, explosion on preferred terminology to find all narrower terms plus all a term’s synonyms (especially helpful for comprehensive searches on drug names).
  • Consider including Unique Medline and Embase Classic in your search, along with Embase.

Drug or Disease Search

  • Rather than using subheadings, consider including subheading concepts with the Boolean AND operator, e.g. diazepam AND ‘adverse drug reaction’; you can include publication years prior to 2000 and have a search that’s broader in scope.