Abstract
The rate of citation duplication and novelty assess ment were determined for a biomedical search in four databases: the in-house database of literature on company pharmaceutical products (CG-DOC), Embase, Medline, and Ringdoc. Of the citations that duplicated across any three databases, 89% had the search term in the title and/or abstract and 86% were assessed as relevant to the search. Novelty in these relevant citations was low; only 15% were novel to the assessor. Citations which were retrieved exclu sively from one database (unique citations) were also subjected to relevance assessment. Most of the unique cita tions did not contain the search term in the title or abstract. However, novelty was high in these unique citations, especially in citations from the in-house database. Of the total output, almost a fifth was contributed by individual databases. The importance of unique citations in multi database searches is discussed.
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