THE BENEFITS OF SEARCHING EMBASE VERSUS MEDLINE FOR PHARMACEUTICAL INFORMATION

Searchers often avoid EMBASE due to its high cost compared to MEDLINE. However, this paper demonstrates that when searching for a variety of pharmaceutical information, retrieval from EMBASE is superior to that from MEDLINE. Duplicates were detected, but more unique citations were found in EMBASE than in MEDLINE. An EMBASE searcher has the powerful ability to use specific drug identifiers as well as brand and manufacturer names. The EMBASE record contains additional information about the drug in question that may be utilised for further searching in EMBASE. Although EMBASE's display costs are high when compared to MEDLINE, title displays are free and searching alone is not expensive. Use of DIALOG Web was found to keep the overall costs to a minimum. Employment of these cost savings measures will help the searcher to decide whether the additional drug information gained from the EMBASE record outweighs the elevated cost of its display.