The aim of this publication is to brief drug regulatory authorities, scientific institutions and pharmaceutical companies worldwide about the development, purpose and appropriate use of Standardized MedDRA Queries (SMQs) in drug surveillance. Two papers in this publication are to assist in the rational use of search queries in the identification and retrieval of potentially relevant individual case safety reports from a database and to harmonize presentation of search results. It also includes examples to illustrate the structure and content of end product.