Tip #41: Hyphens in Ovid EMBASE: the Long and Short of it.

When is a hyphen not a hyphen? When it is a longer hyphen. Dashes range in size from the most narrow, known as a hyphen, to the the slightly wider en dash, to the widest em dash. The en dash is used to represent a span or range of numbers, dates, or time. The em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, and colons. Unfortunately, neither is meant to appear in your search query in Ovid EMBASE. 

Two-part or "hyphenated" used-for terms in Emtree (EMBASE's thesaurus) on the Ovid platform appear to have either en or em dashes instead of hyphens. I discovered that if you paste one of these "hyphenated" terms into the search box, it returns an unsupported characters error.

 

For example, if you copy/paste harmal−d, a used-for term for the medication tamsulosin, into the search box, it will return an unsupported characters error.

However, if you replace the long hyphen by typing the hyphen key, your search will work.

I contacted Ovid Support back in March 2023 about this issue. Our conversation:

Me (3/29): "Search box doesn't support long hyphens found in your drug names. For example, this search string results in an unsupported characters error because of the long hyphen used in harmal−d and tamsu−astellas copied directly from Emtree 'used for' terms. Can this be fixed?" [The short hyphens in other drug names in my search string below were added by me to force adjacency and were processed without issue.]

"(alna OR flomax OR flomaxtra xl OR gl-702 OR gl2702 OR hanlosin OR hanmitams OR harmal−d OR harnal OR harnalidge OR hgp-0412 OR hgp0412 OR hip-1402 OR hip-1801 OR hip1402 OR hip1801 OR josir OR ly-253351 OR ly-253352 OR ly253351 OR ly253352 OR mapelor OR mecir OR omexel OR omic OR omix OR omnic OR pradif OR tamfrex-xl OR tamsu−astellas OR urolosin OR ym-12617 OR ym-617 OR ym12617 OR ym12617-1 OR ym617)"

Ovid Support (3/29): "Thank you for reporting this error. I just found out that long hyphens existed when I saw your notice. I have our database team working on getting this added to our search system. I'll make sure to let you know when this is completed."

Ovid Support (3/30): "If you put the term with the long hyphen in quotation marks we search it without generating an error message. I still have the ticket in with development to get the long hyphen added to our supported characters."

As of August 29, 2023 this issue has not been resolved.

Until it is resolved, when I need to paste a large number of used-for drug terms, I first run them through Find/Replace in Word, copying the long hyphen directly from Emtree because I don't actually know which dash it uses. When I tested alt codes in Word for en & em dashes, neither dash exactly matched the size of the dash used in Emtree.