Discover Ovid’s unique advantages

Ovid® is the only content aggregator tailored specifically for medical research, providing single-click access to essential medical resources such as Embase®, MEDLINE®, and APA PsycInfo®.

Ovid is designed to meet the needs of practitioners, faculty, researchers, and students in the fields of medicine, nursing, and health sciences. With Ovid, gain access to a comprehensive suite of resources, ensuring that all your research needs are met in one place.

Key differentiators:

  • Proprietary precision search engine
    Refines searches using controlled vocabularies, term expansion, wildcards, Booleans, and proximity operators
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
    Returns relevance-ranked results, allowing users to submit full sentences or questions for comprehensive results
  • UMLS-based Medical Lexicon
    Enhances search queries by including related terms, improving the scope and depth of search results

Explore 12 key differentiators for intuitive, effective database searching

Group of researchers reference laptop as they prepare their Open Access paper

Advantages of MEDLINE®, Embase®, APA PsycInfo® on Ovid

Unlock unparalleled research capabilities by accessing Embase, MEDLINE, and APA PsycInfo through a single, seamless search experience. Ovid uniquely combines these essential bibliographic databases, making it the preferred platform for researchers and information professionals. Our system integrates specialized vocabularies like Emtree, MeSH, and the APA Thesaurus with a unified medical lexicon, streamlining your workflow and delivering more comprehensive results.

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  • Basic search

    Ovid’s Basic Search uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) which returns results in relevance ranked order without indexing search results for novices. For new and experienced users looking to find quick but highly relevant results, the NLP algorithm allows them to submit complete sentences or questions. The Basic search query is automatically expanded by including related terms, which use Ovid’s UMLS-based medical lexicon.

  • Advanced search

    For novices, the Ovid default in an Advanced search is seamless; there's no need to know complex syntax. It automatically searches unqualified terms using Ovid’s unique multipurpose field, assuring results most often find relevant articles. It defaults to search in the relevant fields for each of the specific databases, including abstract, headings, subheadings, key concepts, title, table of contents, and other descriptive fields, filtering out the noise that would be introduced if all fields were to be included in a default search. Ovid Term Finder for MeSH, Emtree and the APA Thesaurus allows users to quickly prepare structured searches taking full advantage of the thesaurus tools. For seasoned searchers and information specialists advanced search offers a wealth of search tools including search history sharing, Ovid Analyzer, and extensive limit options like Clinical Queries offers Special Ovid filters, and Expert searches.

    Analyzer: Quickly analyze results up to 5000 records to create improved search strategies utilizing Ovid AI tools. Clinical Queries: The clinical queries provided on each of the three big bibliographic databases: Embase, MEDLINE and APA PsycInfo, provide fast access to validated search filters for “Review Articles,” “Therapy” or “Qualitative Studies.” Limiting using Clinical Queries will restrict retrieval to clinically sound studies for all categories. Ovid Filters and Expert Searches find existing validated searches as examples or starting points for literature research.

  • Ovid Term Finder

    Quickly prepare structured searches using MeSH, Emtree, and APA thesaurus.

    Explore Ovid Term Finder

  • Award-winning support

    Ovid’s award-winning support teams help implement tools into your library for the most optimized deployment, promotion, training, configuration, and customization.

    Support is available 24/7 in over 20 different languages.

Ovid MEDLINE®

The gold standard for biomedical literature from the U.S. National Library of Medicine
Explore Ovid MEDLINE

Embase®

A comprehensive biomedical and pharmacological database ideal for drug and clinical research
Explore Embase

APA PsycInfo®

Essential for psychology and behavioral science research
Explore APA PsycInfo

Resource highlight: American Psychological Association (APA)

Unlock the full spectrum of psychology with APA resources — APA PsycInfo®, APA PsycArticles®, APA PsycBooks®, APA PsycExtra®, APA PsycTests®, and APA PsycTherapy® — on Ovid. Get seamless access to millions of citations, full-text articles, books, and videos with precision search to find the most relevant information first.

Get to the right information quickly

Research efficiency is crucial for uncovering relevant, up-to-date information.

The University of Canterbury recently switched to the Ovid platform to solve research inefficiencies their users faced when searching databases for papers, theses, reviews, and articles.

After migrating to Ovid, librarians estimate users can perform complex searches up to 30 percent faster than before.

Students putting together any type of review may need to include their search strategies and Ovid is simply a better product than the competition when it comes to the ability to do this.
Margaret Paterson, Subject Librarian at University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand

Why one librarian chose APA PsycInfo to improve research efficiency, quality, and confidence

See how the University of Canterbury switched to Ovid for APA PsycInfo — cutting search time by about 30% and boosting research quality and confidence.
Read Case Study

Most popular databases on Ovid:

Ovid Medline®

The world’s leading bibliographic source for biomedical scholarly literature and research — with easy linking to full-text journals

Learn More

Embase®

World-renowned biomedical and drug database of records for journal articles from 1947 onward, plus conference papers and abstracts

Learn More

Evidence-Based Medicine Reviews

Combines several of the most trusted EBMR resources into a single, fully-searchable database; Includes Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Cochrane Clinical Answers

Learn More

American Psychological Association (APA) Resources

Covers the entire spectrum of topic areas in psychology, from addiction and stress to child psychology

Learn More

Ready to elevate your medical research?

Unlock the full potential of your research with Ovid’s trusted medical databases. Whether you're advancing clinical practice, supporting academic inquiry, or driving innovation, Ovid delivers the reliable, comprehensive resources you need. Start your journey toward smarter, evidence-based decisions.

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