14 Building a Keyword Search

For the purposes of talking about keyword searching in EMBASE, let’s talk about a search for any article about topical celecoxib (not just those articles about using topical celecoxib to prevent scarring).

You already have an EMTREE search for this topic in your search history:

‘celecoxib’/exp/dd_tp,dd_td

Create a quick keyword search for this topic:

•  List the concepts :
  • topical
  • celecoxib
• Add alternate terms for each concept, joining the alternate terms with OR
• Enclose multi-word or space-containing terms, if any, in quotation marks.  EMBASE uses single quotation marks (e.g.  ‘amyotrophic lateral sclerosis’) but will accept double quotes if you enter them.
• Add alternate forms of terms, or truncate terms and use the asterisk wildcard to make it possible for your search to retrieve alternate versions of each term (e.g. topical* will retrieve records containing topical and records containing topically)
• Enclose OR’d alternate terms for concept in parentheses.  Parentheses make the search engine handle the OR operations inside the parentheses before it works on the operations outside the parentheses.
• Join the parentheses-enclosed lists of terms for disparate concepts with AND