Semantic relationships and medical bibliographic retrieval: a preliminary assessment

This paper describes a project exploring whether semantic relationships between bibliographic terms may effectively partition the clinical literature. To address this question, a set of semantic relationships was identified between pairs of bibliographic terms taken from four categories: (1) diseases, (2) treatments, (3) tests, and (4) patient characteristics. The MEDLINE system of the National Library of Medicine was used to generate lists of abstracts relating to pairs of clinical terms. Each list of abstracts was examined to identify the semantic relationships, if any, which applied to the two terms in each paper. The study suggests that semantic relationships may play a potentially valuable role in assisting computer-based medical bibliographic retrieval. The degree to which relationships partition the literature is strongly dependent on the underlying semantics of the particular bibliographic terms involved.