Accessing Biomedical Literature in the Current Information Landscape

Abstract

i. Summary Biomedical and life sciences literature is unique because of its exponentially increasing volume and interdisciplinary nature. Biomedical literature access is essential for several types of users including biomedical researchers, clinicians, database curators, and bibliometricians. In the past few decades, several online search tools and literature archives, generic as well as biomedicine-specific, have been developed. We present this chapter in the light of three consecutive steps of literature access: searching for citations, retrieving full-text, and viewing the article. The first section presents the current state of practice of biomedical literature access, including an analysis of the search tools most frequently used by the users, including PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and Embase, and a study on biomedical literature archives such as PubMed Central. The next section describes current research and the state-of-the-art systems motivated by the challenges a user faces during query formulation and interpretation of search results. The research solutions are classified into five key areas related to text and data mining, text similarity search, semantic search, query support, relevance ranking, and clustering results. Finally, the last section describes some predicted future trends for improving biomedical literature access, such as searching and reading articles on portable devices, and adoption of the open access policy.

Journal selection criteria in an open access environment: A comparison between the medicine and social sciences

“…Although health sciences may be broader than medicine, in general, it is reasonable to think that the greater part of the health sciences collection is represented by medicine‐related subjects. Khare, Leaman, and Lu () report that biomedical publications continue to grow rapidly, with over one million published each year. In addition, a number of studies (Jejeebhoy, ; Marušić, ; Momen, ) explain the influence of medical and social sciences research on the progress of the society.…”

“…Although health sciences may be broader than medicine, in general, it is reasonable to think that the greater part of the health sciences collection is represented by medicine-related subjects. Khare, Leaman, and Lu (2014) report that biomedical publications continue to grow rapidly, with over one million published each…”

Change in Format, Register and Narration Style in the Biomedical Literature: A 1948 Example

“…The biomedical literature is estimated to make up a large portion of these published studies [2] and the introduction of internet has opened up the possibility to share and exchange information across research groups to a point that was unthinkable even in the recent past [3]. The web has opened the possibility of easier ways to exchange ideas through social media [4][5][6][7][8] and crowd science [9,10], to retrieve information via open access publications [11], to easily search for information, thanks to databases and repositories [12][13][14][15]. Digital publications have also abated publishing costs, triggering an increase of editorial initiatives, i.e., publications, especially in the natural sciences [16].…”

The Role of the Academic Librarian in the Sciences of Food and Health

“…It has been suggested that Google Scholar is now the first point of call for scholars and that habits developed searching there are translated across to other databases (Marks and Le 2016). Other challenges noted in research is that searching is complex and the selection of keywords and retrieving results is daunting (Khare, Leaman, and Lu 2014). There are great differences in the content and services of databases (Lefebvre et al 2013) and researchers are hampered by inappropriate search strategies, time constraints, and contradictory information (Ho et al 2016).…”