[Use of data processing cards for information retrieval from medical documents. Case reports, bibliographic...

The authors have given pride of place to an old system, punched cards selectors, which are fairly inexpensive to run, and are very flexible in their use. Each card has a part reserved for identification purposes (a case report number or a dated reference to an indexed list of articles) and another part for identification of a certain number of key-words with their corresponding numerical codings, which are also listed in a thesaurus. These key-words serve both for classifying case reports from each department, and for the bibliographic reference cards. When a series of cases are being studied. However, a new thesaurus has to be established during the course of the study. The 960 possible perforations on the international IBM card are largely sufficient as the number of key-words (case reports or bibliographic card-index codings) is not more than 700 and it is unusual to require more than 900 items during the course of a study. The authors find this system very satisfactory and no longer use large computers.