This study analyzes the search behavior of Dutch‐speaking nursing students with a nonnative knowledge of English who searched for information in MEDLINE/PubMed about a specific theme in nursing. We examine whether and to what extent their search efficiency is affected by their language skills. Our task‐oriented approach focuses on three stages of the information retrieval process: need articulation, query formulation, and relevance judgment. The test participants completed a pretest questionnaire, which gave us information about their overall experience with the search system and their self‐reported computer and language skills. The students were briefly introduced to the use of PubMed and MeSH (medical subject headings) before they conducted their keyword‐driven subject search. We assessed the search results in terms of recall and precision, and also analyzed the search process. After the search task, a satisfaction survey and a language test were completed. We conclude that language skills have an impact on the search results. We hypothesize that language support might improve the efficiency of searches conducted by Dutch‐speaking users of PubMed.
With the explosion of information available on the Web, finding specific medical information in an efficient way has become a considerable challenge. PubMed/MEDLINE offers an alternative to freetext searching on the web, allowing searchers to do a keyword-based search using Medical Subject Headings. However, finding relevant information within a limited time frame remains a difficult task.The current study is based on an error analysis of data from a retrieval experiment conducted at the nursing departments of two Belgian universities and a British university. We identified the main difficulties in query formulation and relevance judgment and compared the profiles of the best and worst performers in the test.For the analysis, a query collection was built from the queries submitted by our test participants. The queries in this collection are all aimed at finding the same specific information in PubMed, which allowed us to identify what exactly went wrong in the query formulation step. Another crucial aspect for efficient information retrieval is relevance judgment. Differences between potential and actual recall of each query offered indications of the extent to which participants overlooked relevant citations.The test participants were divided into "worst", "average" and "best" performers based on the number of relevant citations they selected: zero, one or two and three or more, respectively. We tried to find out what the differences in background and in search behavior were between these three groups.
Terms like "thesaurus", "taxonomy", "classification", "glossary", "ontology" and "controlled vocabulary" can be used in diverse contexts, causing confusion and vagueness about their denotation. Is a thesaurus a tool to enrich a writer's style or an indexing tool used in bibliographic retrieval? Or can it be both? A literature study was to clear the confusion, but rather than giving us consensus definitions, it provided us with conflicting descriptions. We classified these definitions into three domains: linguistics, knowledge management and bibliographic retrieval. The scope of the terms is therefore highly dependent on the context. We propose one definition per term, per context. In addition to this intra-conceptual confusion, there is also inter-conceptual vagueness. This leads to the introduction of misnomers, like "ontology" in the Gene Ontology. We examined some important (bio)medical systems for their compatibility with the definitions proposed in the first part of this paper. To conclude, an overview of these systems and their classification into the three domains is given.
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