The PV Wizard is a tool that incorporates Pharmacovigilance into the medication search. It can provide information such as, adverse effects, alternative names for drugs, human limits, and special circumstances to be aware of. Begin your search by finding the medication in the initial search window:
Without narrowing our topic down with any added filters, like shown above, many results can be found. You can review results straight from this first phase of searching or hit "Next Step" to further filter your search.
You'll see here that once you move on to the "Alternative drug names" search function, Embase and PV Wizard have already included all known variants for the drug name. In the case of this example that is 354 variants, which can be switched off by moving the toggle button next to the term to the left. PV Wizard will automatically include those in the search and it will update the number of search results depending on what you do with this option.
The next window after hitting, "Next step" will review the "Adverse drug reactions" where you can view the query PV Wizard created for you and highlights all of the key terms being entered. On the left hand side you can expand the adverse reactions you are specifically searching for and add those to the end of your search string.
The step of "Special situations' works much the same as "Adverse drug reactions" by adding necessary terms to the search string with options to add on.
For "Human limit", there is an opportunity to specify the nature of the request further to what would suit your specific search needs.
Update the search string above to say "AND" instead of "OR", if necessary. Remove a sex, add an age group, etc. until your search string reflects who you are needing to view results about.
Once those steps have been completed, you will view the results and Embase will show you the entire search string being used, if you wish to see that. From there you may use the filter options on the left to further narrow down your results.