Nutritional Sciences

Embase is a database that includes the MEDLINE database, which is the core of PubMed, but it also contains more international journals & indexes pharmaceuticals more precisely.  It's a good database to use in conjunction with PubMed, especially in projects where you need to search more comprehensively.  If you search only one database, you'll miss a lot of the available literature.

Remember that when you use a different database, you may need to use other search terms.  Articles in Embase are indexed by Emtree terms, which can differ from MeSH terms.

We recommend that you begin on the Advanced page.

The set of results is rather large & not as focused on the topic as you would want.

You can see how Embase "translated" your search under History above your results.Some mapping to index terms occurred: 'dietary intake'/exp means that the phrase was mapped to an index (Emtree) term, but dairy products mapped to dairy only & this may be why the results are so large. How do you create a search in Embase that will give you access to Emtree terms consistently?

When you search in Embase, you should always enter each term separately. When you begin to type, a list of possible Emtree terms appears below the search box.

Working with one concept at a time can be a useful way to work in Embase, so the first concept looks like this when translated by Embase: dietary intake'/exp OR 'dietary intake' OR 'food intake'/exp OR 'food intake'

The second search string looks like this:  'dairy product'/exp OR 'dairy product' OR 'milk' OR 'cheese' OR 'yoghurt'

Both searches can be combined with AND or OR using the Combine feature above search history..

Adding United States to the search brings the total down considerably.

Filters will help focus the search further.  In Embase, there are some filters at the top of the page & another set (some of which are the same) on the left. At the top, I'll use the Age limit to add Adolescents.  Apply the filters by clicking the Search button.

You can add filters from the menu on the left, for example, Study or Publication type. Click the Apply button at the top or bottom of the filter list to apply these filters.

A useful tool, cited reference searching, lets you look into the future, at articles that have referenced an article in your list of results.  In Embase, you'll see a Cited by:[#] notation after many articles, which tells you that this article has been cited by that number of articles in a particular database.

Click the link to be taken to the list, provided by the Scopus database.

If you enter one search term at a time into the search box, you will see that Emtree terms appear below the box.  You can accept (by clicking them) or not.  When you do accept the Emtree term, the word(s) will appear in the search box within single quote marks.

Note also that there are some default settings underneath the search box.  "Search as broadly as possible" is checked; this means that Embase will search for results through both keywords & Emtree terms.  Uncheck this box if you need to narrow your search to citations that are indexed only.

Below that is one of the places where you can set a publication date limit.  Either accept "all years" by doing nothing or uncheck that box & add the years of your choice from the dropdown lists.