Literature searching: Ovid Emcare

• Bibliographic database of nursing and allied health literature
• Years of coverage: Indexed (catalogued) retrospectively from 1995 to present. Early records included from early 1900s with new records added on an ongoing basis.

• Use the same method as searching Ovid Medline - combining subject headings and textwords
• Subject headings will appear slightly different (Emcare uses Emtree Terms rather than MeSH)
• Simple search syntax (commands) such as .ti,ab are exactly the same

Translating a search from Ovid Embase to Ovid Emcare

• Use your Ovid Embase search strategy as a cheat sheet.
• The layout of Ovid Emcare is almost identical to Embase - they are closely related databases
• Check that the subject headings exist in Emcare - these are mostly the same, but Embase has more than Emcare
• Textword search lines will be the same - you can copy and paste these in
• The way you group concepts will be the same

Translating a search from Ovid Medline to Ovid Emcare

• Use your Ovid Medline search strategy as a cheat sheet.
• The layout of Ovid Emcare is very similar to Medline, except the subject headings are different
• SEARCH FOR DATABASE SPECIFIC SUBJECT HEADINGS (this is the main difference - subject headings in Medline and Emcare are very different)
• Textword search lines will be the same, as long as you have kept to title and abstract fields - you can copy and paste these in
• The way you group concepts will be the same

Don't 'limit to humans'

If you select 'limit to humans' you risk losing all non-indexed and pre-print publications in a database which have not been indexed as 'human'. This could be thousands of records.

Instead, remove the animal studies

A safer alternative is to search for the things we don't want (in this case animal studies) and remove them from the results. Adjust the line numbers below as appropriate.

Ovid Emcare example

6. [last line of search - your line number will be different]
7. exp animal/ not human/ 
8. 6 not 7