MEDLINE Versus EMBASE and CINAHL for Telemedicine Searches

There are multiple bibliographic databases for use in telemedicine research. These include Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE), Excerpta Medica Database (EMBASE), and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), which are easy to use, easily accessible, and, in some cases, fee based. The authors compared these three to estimate what proportion of potentially relevant publications would be missed when only MEDLINE was used. Each of these three was found to be not 100% identical. The implication was that some valuable literature may not be cited, as it was not found by the researchers when they were doing a search. Researchers should consider multiple choices for their literature searches to ensure a comprehensive review. Introduction:Researchers in the domain of telemedicine throughout the world tend to search multiple bibliographic databases to retrieve the highest possible number of publications when conducting review projects.Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE), Excerpta Medica Database (EMBASE), and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) are three popular databases in the discipline of biomedicine that are used for conducting reviews. Access to the MEDLINE database is free and easy, whereas EMBASE and CINAHL are not free and sometimes not easy to access for researchers in small research centers.Objective:This project sought to compare MEDLINE with EMBASE and CINAHL to estimate what proportion of potentially relevant publications would be missed when only MEDLINE is used in a review project, in comparison to when EMBASE and CINAHL are also used.Methods:Twelve simple keywords relevant to 12 different telemedicine applications were searched using all three databases, and the results were compared.Results:About 9%–18% of potentially relevant articles would have been missed if MEDLINE had been the only database used.Conclusions:It is preferable if all three or more databases are used when conducting a review in telemedicine. Researchers from developing countries or small research institutions could rely on only MEDLINE, but they would loose 9%–18% of the potentially relevant publications. Searching MEDLINE alone is not ideal, but in a resource-constrained situation, it is definitely better than nothing.