Searching for clinical evidence in CiteSpace.

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Information Science
• Evidence-Based Medicine

Background:

• Locating the best clinical evidence is essential for evidence-based medicine (EBM).
• Traditional search methods can be time-consuming and complex.
• Integrating diverse evidence sources presents a significant challenge.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and demonstrate a unifying framework for searching clinical evidence.
• To simplify the process of finding the best available evidence for clinical questions.
• To explore the use of visualization techniques in evidence retrieval.

Main Methods:

• Combining visualization techniques with traditional EBM search methods.
• Developing a unifying framework to search across multiple sources (e.g., Web of Science, PubMed).
• Implementing a prototype system to visualize evidence distribution within subject domains.

Main Results:

• The proposed framework simplifies the task of locating clinical evidence.
• Visualization techniques provide a broader context of the underlying subject domain.
• Successful application demonstrated in heart diseases and lung cancer literature.

Conclusions:

• Combining visualization with traditional EBM methods can significantly improve evidence searching.
• The developed framework offers a practical approach to accessing distributed clinical evidence.
• Implications for designing user-friendly, visualization-based evidence searching tools are discussed.