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Updated: Jun 25, 2026
08:37
The Application of Open Searching-based Approaches for the Identification of Acinetobacter baumannii O-linked Glycopeptides
Published on: November 2, 2021
Is searching full text more effective than searching abstracts?
1National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. jimmylin@umd.edu
BMC Bioinformatics
|February 5, 2009
Summary
Searching full-text scientific articles, not just abstracts, improves information retrieval. Paragraph-level searches (spans) within full texts are more effective than abstract-only searches, suggesting combined approaches yield best results.
Area of Science:
- Life Sciences
- Bioinformatics
- Information Retrieval
Background:
- Growing availability of full-text scientific articles online.
- Scientists can now access full content beyond bibliographic records.
- Emerging trend prompts investigation into search effectiveness.
Purpose of the Study:
- Compare the effectiveness of searching full text versus abstracts.
- Evaluate text retrieval algorithms on MEDLINE abstracts and full-text articles.
- Assess retrieval performance on spans (paragraphs) within full-text articles.
Main Methods:
- Utilized data from the TREC 2007 genomics track evaluation.
- Compared two retrieval models: bm25 and Lucene search engine algorithm.
- Evaluated retrieval on abstracts, full articles, and article spans (paragraphs).
Main Results:
- Treating entire articles as an indexing unit did not consistently outperform abstract-only search.
- Retrieval based on spans (paragraphs) consistently outperformed abstract-only search.
- Combining evidence from spans and full articles may yield highest effectiveness.
Conclusions:
- Searching full text increases the likelihood of finding relevant articles compared to abstract-only search.
- Full-text collections are valuable for text retrieval, necessitating new algorithms for digital archives.
- Development of distributed text retrieval algorithms is needed due to the size of full-text articles.
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