Finding Research Instruments

Embase is a biomedical and pharmacological database, similar to PubMed (the source of the MEDLINE data set), but with a greater international scope. Embase is particularly good for drug and medical device research and pharmacovigilance.

Embase is probably not the best place to search for instruments by topic. The records in Embase aren't designed to highlight the names of these tools, the database is extremely large, and the search techniques can be challenging. That said, you can look over the suggestions below should you decide you'd like to try.

The size of the Embase database makes it a challenge to search for research instruments by topic. Embase uses a controlled vocabulary, or standardized terminology, called Emtree to label references based on their content. The number of Emtree terms relating to instruments, and their diverse locations in the Emtree hierarchy, make using them for this purpose very difficult. Should you decide you definitely want to try searching by topic for instruments in Embase, please contact a librarian.

If you know the title or acronym of an instrument, search for it in the Quick search page, using single quotes around phrases. In the example below, the * is used to look for any ending of multiple words in the instrument title, since the way it's described in the literature can be inconsistent.

When searching using an instrument's acronym, consider whether that acronym is used for other instruments, other topics, or is an actual word; any of these can cause noise in the search. You may want to incorporate some of the ideas from the Search By Topic box to limit your search if you get a lot of irrelevant results.

Searches on the Embase Quick search page default to Broad search, which looks for both Emtree terms, exploding all narrower terms in the tree, and the word or phrase as free text (or keyword).

Follow the advice for searching by topic or title.

Do a new search for validity OR reliability

Finally, combine these two searches with AND.