Pubmed, Scopus and EMBASE coverage?

[ec86]

Hello all medical researchers! Sorry for this noob question, but does anyone have an idea how much of the coverages of Pubmed, Scopus and EMBASE overlap? I am debating whether or not to include EMBASE.

Is the a resource to check the coverage overlap of various major databases?

Thanks!

[ridgey]

Scopus claims to have 100% medline (i.e. pubmed) coverage - surely they couldn't claim it if it weren't the case.

At a job I had a couple of years ago, whenever we did SRs, we generally searched medline, embase, and depending on the topic - psychmed. I couldn't tell you whether we searched both embase and medline purely for methodological rigour or they brought up (substanitally) different articles, because I just used OVID and de-duped.

It surprises me that you have to worry about this though - surely your library will have already chosen which databases you have access to through your institution?

[ec86]

Hi ridgey, thanks for your response!

I have access to all these databases, but I need to justify the databases I use for my searches in my thesis and it was difficult finding information about the overlap. However, recently I asked the local medical science librarian and apparently the difference between Embase and scopus and PubMed is that it has more European content, but otherwise there's a lot of overlap. I guess I will go with all three of these databases.