Literature & clinical references
Embase
Excerpta Medica Database
"MEDLINE's complement — pharmacology, European journals, conference abstracts."
About the resource
Embase, originally Excerpta Medica when it launched in 1947, is Elsevier's biomedical and pharmacological bibliographic database — historically the European counterpart to MEDLINE. It indexes over 8,500 journals plus tens of thousands of conference abstracts, with particular depth in drug research, pharmacovigilance and adverse-event reporting.
Its indexing language is Emtree, a hierarchical thesaurus closely related to MeSH but with finer granularity around drugs, devices and substances; Cochrane and most major systematic-review groups consider an Embase search alongside MEDLINE the minimum acceptable coverage. The interface offers PV (pharmacovigilance) and trial filters that PubMed lacks. Access is paywalled and typically institutional.
What you'd use it for
- 01Pair with MEDLINE for systematic-review-grade literature coverage
- 02Surface drug-safety and pharmacovigilance reports
- 03Find European-journal content under-indexed elsewhere
- 04Search conference abstracts for unpublished or in-progress trial data
How you access it
Web UIDirect export to systematic-review toolsAPI (Elsevier)