Improving information retrieval with multiple health terminologies in a quality-controlled gateway

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Information Science
• Medical Librarianship

Background:

• The Catalog and Index of French-language Health Internet resources (CISMeF) is a curated gateway for French health web resources.
• CISMeF traditionally relies on the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus for indexing and retrieval.
• A limitation of a single thesaurus is its potential weakness in comprehensive indexing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the added value of using multiple terminologies and their semantic relationships for indexing and retrieval in CISMeF.
• To improve the discovery of health resources that align with user expectations.
• To overcome the limitations of relying solely on the MeSH thesaurus.

Main Methods:

• Integrated twelve health terminologies into the CISMeF information system.
• Conducted comparative searches using MeSH alone versus multiple terminologies with semantic links.
• Evaluated and compared the performance of the two search modes.

Main Results:

• Multiple-terminology search mode improved overall coverage by 15% (16,283 resources vs. 14,159).
• Additional resources found were 56.6% relevant, 24.7% intermediate, and 18.7% irrelevant.
• The enhanced retrieval demonstrated the benefit of broader terminology integration.

Conclusions:

• The multiple-terminology approach significantly enhanced information retrieval in CISMeF.
• Integrating additional health terminologies improved the recall of relevant resources.
• Further expansion with more terminologies is expected to enable broader studies in multi-terminology retrieval.