Biomedical literature retrieval: comparison of on-line and manual system

Various data bases available for searching the biomedical literature were evaluated in terms of literature coverage, cost, and lag time. Five drug-disease topics were searched using on-line and manual data bases. With the exception of International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, on-line systems contained more citations than the corresponding manual versions. Of the manual data bases, Index Medicus contained the most citations. Lag times ranged from 66 to 673 days for the various data bases. The manual versions were less expensive per citation to search than the corresponding on-line data bases. On-line searching may actually increase the costs of literature retrieval, but the increase in the number of articles retrieved suggests that on-line literature retrieval is more cost-effective than manual searches.