New Web Tools to Improve PubMed Searches for the Biomedical Community

Abstract

Nowadays, numerous tools, search engines, and medical aggregators are available on the Internet, but the biomedical community is still having difficulty accessing and retrieving information effectively. The aim of this survey was to analyze and evaluate PubMed third-party tools for optimizing biomedical information retrieval. Among the newest tools, the most respectful and close to PubMed configuration and structure were taken into consideration. A natural-language standard query, thrombocytopenia AND human AND hepatitis, was performed on five selected and classified PubMed third-party tools: SLIM, Anne O'Tate, Vivisimo or ClusterMed, Hubmed, and PubFocus. The results were evaluated according to the following criteria: accessibility, user friendliness, and answer timeliness. Three tools showed good results (three-star score), two were excellent (five-star score), and one was poor (two-star score). The syntactic and semantic correctness of the search strategies set and the proper use of the PubMed MeSH Terms cannot be ignored in biomedical searches using MEDLINE/PubMed.

Keywords

PubMed third-party tools Information storage and retrieval Performance evaluation Information literacy Aggregators

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