The Medline/full‐text research project

Emma Jean McKinin, MaryEllen Sievert, E. Diane Johnson and Joyce A. Mitchell

Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1991, vol. 42, issue 4, 297-307

Abstract: This project was designed to test the relative efficacy of index terms and full‐text for the retrieval of documents in those MEDLINE journals for which full‐text searching was also available. The full‐text files used were MEDIS from Mead Data Central and CCML from BRS Information Technologies. One hundred clinical medical topics were searched in these two files as well as the MEDLINE file to accumulate the necessary data. It was found that full‐text identified significantly more relevant articles than did the indexed file, MEDLINE. The full‐text searches, however, lacked the precision of searches done in the indexed file. Most relevant items missed in the full‐text files, but identified in MEDLINE, were missed because the searcher failed to account for some aspect of natural language, used a logical or positional operator that was too restrictive, or included a concept which was implied, but not expressed in the natural language. Very few of the unique relevant full‐text citations would have been retrieved by title or abstract alone. Finally, as of July, 1990 the more current issue of a journal was just as likely to appear in MEDLINE as in one of the full‐text files. © 1991 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Date: 1991
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199105)42:43.0.CO;2-M

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamest:v:42:y:1991:i:4:p:297-307

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-4571

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().