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Updated: Aug 9, 2026
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A Metadata Extraction Approach for Clinical Case Reports to Enable Advanced Understanding of Biomedical Concepts
Published on: September 20, 2018
The Medline/full-text research project
E J McKinin1, M Sievert, E D Johnson
1University of Missouri-Columbia 65211.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science. American Society for Information Science
|May 1, 1991
Summary
Full-text searching in medical databases like MEDIS and CCML retrieved more relevant articles than index terms in MEDLINE. However, full-text searches were less precise, often missing relevant documents due to natural language complexities.
Area of Science:
- Medical Informatics
- Information Retrieval
Background:
- MEDLINE is a primary source for biomedical literature retrieval.
- Full-text searching offers an alternative retrieval method.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compare the retrieval efficacy of index terms versus full-text searching.
- To evaluate document retrieval in MEDLINE journals with available full-text.
Main Methods:
- Searched 100 clinical medical topics across MEDLINE, MEDIS, and CCML databases.
- Compared the number of relevant articles retrieved by each search method.
Main Results:
- Full-text searching identified significantly more relevant articles than MEDLINE's index terms.
- Full-text searches exhibited lower precision compared to MEDLINE.
- Relevant articles missed in full-text were often due to natural language processing or restrictive search logic.
Conclusions:
- Full-text searching enhances retrieval of relevant medical literature but requires careful search strategy development.
- Index terms in MEDLINE remain valuable for precise retrieval.
- The timeliness of journal content was comparable across MEDLINE and full-text databases.
