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Original application technology of SBD (Słownikowa Baza Danych) from Szczecin in evaluation of treatment results in larynx and hypopharynx carcinoma was presented. The aim of the report is to present advantages of a system which provides multidirectional date and its particular analysis.
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This study sought to compare the sensitivity and precision of Embase, Medline and PsycINFO bibliographic database searches for randomized controlled trials of cognitive therapy for depression. Searches in each database combined with a hand search in five selected journals formed the total pool against which each search was assessed. Sensitivities of standard searches (index terms only) were 68%, 84% and 38% in Embase, Medline and PsycINFO respectively. Sensitivities of expert searches (index and free text terms) were 76%, 97% and 65% for Embase, Medline and PsycINFO respectively. Medline appears to be the most efficient at identifying articles describing psychological treatment evaluation.
The usefulness and limitations of bibliographic database software is discussed. As an excellent example of how this medium can be used, the electronic database on palliative care developed by Dr. Nathan Cherny that is available on the World Wide Web is described.
OBJECTIVE: To determine the efficiency of the major bibliographic databases by assessing the percentage of references among the total literature available that can be retrieved from each database. We also evaluated the best database combinations to carry out an exhaustive search. METHODS: BIOSIS, EMBASE, MEDLINE, NIOSH-TIC, and TOXLINE were searched on two topics: allergy to latex and asbestos and mesothelioma, in the title, abstract, or keywords (textwords). This search was performed for the years 1994 and 1995. All the records were classified by journal and author's name and were verified for each record whether or not it was indexed in each database. Statistical analysis was performed with chi 2 test. RESULTS: 777 articles in 510 issues were found. The efficiency of each database (percentage of articles recovered) and of combinations varied between 11% and 63% for one database and between 42% and 86% for a combination of two databases. The reasons why these differences exist between databases, and within a database, between two different subjects or two different years are reported. CONCLUSION: Firstly, it is not advisable to assert that a bibliography is complete when only one database is searched. Secondly, the efficiency of the databases may be quite different. Finally, it is suggested that the best way to be as exhaustive as possible is to search two or more databases-for example, in EMBASE and TOXLINE, or to a lesser extent EMBASE and MEDLINE. This seems to be the best compromise solution between time consumed for searching and efficiency.
BACKGROUND: The work participation of people with chronic diseases is a growing concern within the field of occupational medicine. Information on this topic is dispersed across a variety of data sources, making it difficult for health professionals to find relevant studies for literature reviews and guidelines. AIM: The goal of this project was to identify bibliographic databases and search terms that could be most useful for retrieving relevant studies on this topic. METHODS: Five broad questions regarding work participation and chronic disease were formulated, focusing on angina pectoris, depression, diabetes mellitus, hearing impairment and rheumatoid arthritis. A search strategy for retrieving information on these questions was developed and run in five bibliographic databases: Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Cinahl and OSHROM. Relevant publications were selected from the search results. The utility of the selected databases and search terms was evaluated by analysing the number of relevant publications that were retrieved. RESULTS: The number of relevant publications retrieved from each database varied. Most (84%) of the relevant publications that were retrieved from each database were unique to that source. For each database, specific search terms for the concept of 'work' were useful for retrieving relevant publications. CONCLUSION: Medline, EMBASE and PsycINFO are useful databases for quick searches. Useful search terms for the concept of 'work' are work capacity, work disability, vocational rehabilitation, occupational health, sick leave, absenteeism, return to work, retirement, employment status and work status. For comprehensive searches, we recommend additional searches in Cinahl and OSHROM, adapting the search terms to specific databases.
The National Library of Medicine has offered TOXLINE, an online interactive bibliographic database of biomedical (toxicology) information since 1972. Files from 11 secondary sources comprise the TOXLINE database. The sources supplied bibliographic records in different formats and data structures. Data from each supplier's format had to be converted into a format suitable for TOXLINE. Three different, successive retrieval systems were used for the TOXLINE database which required reformatting of the data. Algorithms for generating terms for inverted file search methods were tested. Special characters peculiar to the scientific literature were evaluated during search term generation. Developing search term algorithms for chemical names in the scientific literature required techniques different from those used for nonscientific literature. Problems with replication of bibliographic records from multiple secondary sources are described. Some observations about online interactive databases since TOXLINE was first offered are noted.
This article presents a description and case study of CiteSpace II, a Java application which supports visual exploration with knowledge discovery in bibliographic databases. Highly cited and pivotal documents, areas of specialization within a knowledge domain, and emergence of research topics are visually mapped through a progressive knowledge domain visualization approach to detecting and visualizing trends and patterns in scientific literature. The test case in this study is progressive knowledge domain visualization of the field of medical informatics. Datasets based on publications from twelve journals in the medical informatics field covering the time period from 1964-2004 were extracted from PubMed and Web of Science (WOS) and developed as testbeds for evaluation of the CiteSpace system. Two resulting document-term co-citation and MeSH term co-occurrence visualizations are qualitatively evaluated for identification of pivotal documents, areas of specialization, and research trends. Practical applications in bio-medical research settings are discussed.
OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to make a comparative description of the evolution and distribution of international research into pharmacoepidemiology, using three bibliographic databases, in order to select the most appropriate for future bibliometric studies. METHODS: Bibliographic searches were performed using the following databases: Medline (1966-99), IPA (1970-99) and SCI (1990-99), using the term 'pharmacoepidemiology'. On the basis of these searches, the number of original articles per year and per journal title were noted. The growth of the output of scientific writing was found to fit Price's law. RESULTS: A total of 845 original articles were recovered: 467 from IPA, 219 from Medline and 159 from SCI. The highest mean number of original articles per year (33.4) was obtained with the IPA database. Price's exponential growth pattern was observed among all three databases. The total numbers of journals in which the original articles were published were 102 in Medline, 65 in IPA and 60 in SCI. The journals providing a single original article comprised 65% of the Medline titles and 61% of those in IPA and SCI. CONCLUSIONS: International research into pharmacoepidemiology presents an exponential growth pattern, in accordance with Price's law. There is a large degree of publishing dispersion. IPA was found to be the bibliographic database that recovered the greatest number of original articles, nearly half of which were published in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. We therefore consider the latter database appropriate for bibliometric studies in the field of pharmacoepidemiology.
OBJECTIVE: To describe how Spanish-speaking biomedical professionals in Latin America access and utilize bibliographic databases. METHODS: Based on a MEDLINE search, 2 515 articles published between August 2002 and August 2003 were identified that dealt with and/or had authors from 16 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The search was limited to references to basic science, clinical science, or social medicine. A survey was sent by e-mail to researchers who lived in 15 of the 16 countries (the exception being Nicaragua). The survey asked about the researcher's area of work (basic science, clinical science, or public health), the level of skill in using databases, the frequency and type of access to the databases most utilized, the impact from not having access to the full text of articles when preparing a manuscript, and how the respondent usually obtained the full-text version of articles. RESULTS: A total of 586 e-mail messages with the survey were sent out, and 185 responses were received (32%). The databases most utilized to obtain biomedical information were MEDLINE (34.1%), general search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and AltaVista) (15.9%), on-line journals (9.8%), BIREME-LILACS (6.0%), BioMedNet (5.4%), the databases of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States of America (5.2%), and the Cochrane Library (4.9%). Of the respondents, 64% said they had average or advanced abilities in using MEDLINE. However, 71% of the respondents did not use or were not aware of the MEDLINE Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), a controlled vocabulary established by the National Library of Medicine of the United States of America for indexing articles. The frequency of accessing the databases was similar in all the countries studied, without significant differences in terms of the type of access (authorized access to commercial databases, unauthorized access to those databases, or access to databases available for free) or the level of abilities. Of the respondents, 87% said they had not included important references in the articles that they had published because they had not had access to the full text of those items, and 56% said they had cited articles that they had not read in full. In addition, 7.6% of the respondents admitted to unauthorized use of limited-access databases, such as through borrowed passwords or copied disks. More than two-thirds of the respondents said they obtained the full text of articles through photocopies or directly from the authors. CONCLUSIONS: In order to encourage scientific output by Latin American researchers, more of them need to be trained in the use of the most frequently used databases, especially MEDLINE. Those researchers also need to have expanded access to the biomedical literature.
Medical informatics became a medical specialty during the last years and this is evidenced by a great amount of journal articles regarding the subject published worldwide. We compared the presentation of Medical Informatics in two different bibliographic databases: MEDLINE and LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Literature on the Health Sciences). Previous studies described how Medical Informatics was represented in MEDLINE, but we wanted to compare it to a regional database as LILACS. We search both databases completely (MEDLINE 1966 -2002 and LILACS 1982-2002) using the keyword "Medical Informatics" as MeSH term in MEDLINE and as DeCS term in LILACS, and we added "medical informatics" as text word and analyzed the references obtained as results. We found that MEDLINE properly represents the impact of Medical Informatics in non-Latin-American international journals, but lacks of a considerable amount of articles from this region, while LILACS, although in comparison it is smaller in size, has more articles regarding the subject. So we think that LILACS properly represents the specialty in Latin America and the Caribbean Region.
Research in primary dental care, recertification, continuing professional development, lifelong learning, peer review and quality healthcare are all informed by the published literature. Dental practitioners can find out about reliable and up-to-date information available in the published literature by searching bibliographic databases. This concluding article alerts readers to some of the limitations and pitfalls of data-base-searching.
Research in primary dental care, recertification, continuing professional development, lifelong learning, peer review and quality healthcare are all informed by the published literature. Dental practitioners can find out about reliable and up-to-date information available in the published literature by searching bibliographic databases. Published in two parts, this article describes the databases relevant to clinical dental practice and explains the generic skills required to search them effectively, focusing on MEDLINE, the database most relevant for the majority of dental practitioners, which is freely available via the World Wide Web (WWW). The article differentiates between sensitivity (maximum recall) and specificity (relevance of recall), and suggests how to identify a manageable number of relevant citations, how to save the citations, and how to obtain the full text. In part 2, the article concludes by alerting readers to some of the limitations and pitfalls of database-searching.
BACKGROUND: Medical practitioners have unmet information needs. Health care research dissemination suffers from both "supply" and "demand" problems. One possible solution is to develop methodologic search filters ("hedges") to improve the retrieval of clinically relevant and scientifically sound study reports from bibliographic databases. To develop and test such filters a hand search of the literature was required to determine directly which articles should be retrieved, and which not retrieved. OBJECTIVE: To determine the extent to which 6 research associates can agree on the classification of articles according to explicit research criteria when hand searching the literature. DESIGN: Blinded, inter-rater reliability study. SETTING: Health Information Research Unit, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. PARTICIPANTS: 6 research associates with extensive training and experience in research methods for health care research. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Inter-rater reliability measured using the kappa statistic for multiple raters. RESULTS: After one year of intensive calibration exercises research staff were able to attain a level of agreement at least 80% greater than that expected by chance (kappa statistic) for all classes of articles. CONCLUSION: With extensive training multiple raters are able to attain a high level of agreement when classifying articles in a hand search of the literature.
In the organism, nutrient exchanges among tissues and organs are subject to numerous sources of physiological or nutritional variation, and the contribution of individual factors needs to be quantified before establishing general response laws. To achieve this, meta-analysis of data from publications is a useful tool. The objective of this work was to develop a bibliographic database of nutrient fluxes across organs and tissues of ruminant animals (Flora) under Access using the Merise method. The most important criteria for Flora were the ease to relate the various information, the exhaustivity and the accuracy of the data input, a complete description of the diets, taking into account the methods of the methodological procedures of measurement and analysis of blood nutrients and the traceability of the information. The conceptual data model was built in 6 parts. The first part describes the authors and source of publication, and the person in charge of data input. It clearly separates and identifies the experiments, the groups of animals and the treatments within a publication. The second part is concerned with feeds, diets and their chemical composition and nutritional value. The third and fourth parts describe the infusion of any substrates and the methods employed, respectively. The fifth part is devoted to the results of blood flows and nutrient fluxes. The sixth part gathers miscellaneous experimental information. All these parts are inter-connected. To model this database, the Merise method was utilised and 26 entities and 32 relationships were created. At the physical level, 93 tables were created, corresponding, for the majority, to entities and relationships of the data model. They were divided into reference tables (n = 65) and data tables (n = 28). Data processing was developed in Flora and included the control of the data, generic calculations of unknown data from given data, the automation of the estimation of the missing data or the chemical composition of the diets. It also included the construction of tables for meta-analyses and the study of the variations of several factors within publications (pre-coding of meta-analyses). Overall, the system was built to facilitate the gathering, input, validation, management and retrieval of data from publications.
UNLABELLED: The term "Complementary and Alternative Medicine" (CAM) describes a variety of approaches to medical theory and practice that have not been commonly accepted by representatives of conventional medicine. This is why research results from this field of medicine are seldom reported in well-established medical journals. Due to the high level of interest and demand for complementary medicine, though, there is an urgent need for a system covering the scientific literature of complementary medicine. Against this background, the chair of Medical Theory and Complementary Medicine at the University of Witten/Herdecke has launched the CAMbase project. The database can be accessed online and is free of charge or additional costs at www.cambase.de. METHODS: Using XML-based protocols, existing databases of Complementary and Alternative Medicine were imported and indexed in a central database for online retrieval. XML-based interfaces, which have been developed within this project (implementation of Open Archives Initiative protocols), can be used for embedding CAMbase into larger bibliographical networks. RESULTS: Since the relaunch of CAMbase in August 2003 an average of 107 search queries per day have been registered. An initial analysis of the search terms has demonstrated that CAMbase is not only used by scientists and researchers but also by both health professionals in clinical practice and patients in search for information about complementary therapies. PERSPECTIVES: In the long term the accessibility of full-text versions of original publications on Complementary Medicine will have to be improved. The further development of CAMbase in co-operation with the Library of Witten/Herdecke University is currently being planned.
Index Medicus, edited by the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA, is a bibliography of the international biomedical literature and indexes more than 3,000 scientific reviews. The printed edition contains five sections: a list of indexed journals, the medical subject headings, a bibliography of medical reviews, a subject section and an author section. We explain how to conduct bibliographical searches within these five sections. The list of indexed journal shows the reader the abbreviated title in addition to the full title for writing a citation, as well as most of the important journals indexed by subject and the editing countries. Authors names are simply retrieved within the author section. Subjects are located first under the medical subject headings which contain the keywords, and then under the bibliography of medical reviews or the subject section. Despite the emergence of computer-aided literature searches, the printed data base of the Index Medicus remains a useful tool in the medical libraries around the world.
This paper provides technical assistance for bibliographic retrieval using the Medline CDRom, Medfive, with Ovid Search Software. Using a particular search as an example, we show, step by step and screen by screen, how to work using all the available features of this valuable bibliographic search tool.