Print Message

Hi, Sarah!

I can't speak specifically to the Embase/Emtree issue, but I have an outstanding ticket submitted to Scopus a month ago asking how index terms are applied in the database. 

Scopus documentation says index terms are not pulled directly from the records in the original datasets (such as MEDLINE or, presumably, Embase), but that Scopus indexers apply terms themselves from existing thesauri. Excerpted from their 2022 Content Coverage Guide (section 3.3), attached: "Scopus manually adds index terms for 80% of the titles included in Scopus. These index terms are derived from thesauri that Elsevier owns or licenses and are added to improve search recall. A team of professional indexers assigns index terms to records according to the following controlled vocabularies: Ei Thesaurus ... Emtree medical terms ... MeSH ... [several others].... There is no limit to the number of index terms that Scopus can add to records. However, in the case of Emtree and MeSH terms (both terms are added to records where available), only the index terms that have a direct relation with the topic of the article are displayed and made searchable on Scopus in order to avoid retrieving irrelevant results. For Emtree, the index terms with a direct relation are the Major Focus and the mentioned index terms. For MeSH, the index terms with a direct relation are Major Topics and Minor Topics...."

A tip I read on Expert Searching last year from Krizia Tuand suggested searching TITLE-ABS() OR AUTHKEY() rather than TITLE-ABS-KEY() since the KEY() in the latter field combo includes INDEXTERMS. That way you can work around any potential indexing and just treat it as a plain keyword search approach, like [tiab] vs. [tw] in PubMed.

I hope this helps!

-Hilary