PubMed searches by Dutch‐speaking nursing students: The impact of language and system experience

Abstract

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.

Lost in PubMed. Factors influencing the success of medical information retrieval

“…This corroborates our previous finding that the extra step of selecting MeSH terms can be very useful to prevent errors from percolating to the final query (Vanopstal, et al, 2012).…”

“…the time spent on searching for MeSH terms and combining them into a query. As we explained in our previous study (Vanopstal, et al, 2012), longer querying times can indicate hesitation. A one-way ANOVA test showed that there were significant differences in querying times between the performer types (F(2, 95)= 11.896, p<.001).…”

“…In previous research (Vanopstal, et al, 2012), we have shown that MeSH terms have a corrective effect; they compensate for possible errors in the free-text search terms that were entered in the MeSH module.…”

“…As described in Vanopstal et al (2012), the querying step is "an alternation of search term formulation and MeSH term selection". It results in the construction of a query and ends when the user submits the query to the search engine.…”

“…We developed a gold standard, consisting of 62 to 66 citations, depending on the moment of the test session (for more information see (Vanopstal, Vander Stichele, Laureys, & Buysschaert, 2012)). The students' selections were compared against this gold standard in order to calculate recall.…”