ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS

Electronic Health Records Interfaced by PubMed



Electronic Health Records Interfaced by PubMed

Introduction

Many researchers in medical and life sciences commonly use the PubMed online search engine (http://www.pubmed.gov) to access the MEDLINE bibliographic database. The researchers' strategies were investigated as a function of their knowledge of the content area. Sixteen life science researchers with no experience in neuroscience and 16 neuroscience researchers of matched professional experience performed five bibliographic search tasks about neuroscience topics. Objective measures and concomitant verbal protocols were used to assess behaviour and performance (Belkin, 2000, 133).

Whatever their knowledge of PubMed, neuroscientists could find adequate references within the allotted time period. Despite their lack of knowledge in neuroscience, life scientists could select adequate references with the same efficiency. However, differences were observed in the way neuroscientists and life scientists proceeded. For instance, life scientists took more time to read the task instructions and opened more abstracts while selecting their answers. These data suggest that regular use of online databases combined with graduate-level expertise in a broad scientific field like biology can compensate for the absence of knowledge in the specific domain in which references are sought. The large inter-individual variability in performance within both groups implies that beyond domain knowledge, individual cognitive abilities are the main determinants of bibliographic search performance.

Discussion and Analysis

According to De Groote and Dorsch (2003) and Tenopir et al. (2003), the PubMed search engine (http://www.pubmed.gov), which provides access to the MEDLINE database operated by the United States National Library of Medicine, has become the most popular online bibliographic resource for life scientists and clinicians. They perceive PubMed as both easy to use and very efficient, and they access it directly, i.e. without having librarians or information specialists do the searching for them.

Because most scientists and clinicians have learned to use PubMed on their own, the way they use it is very basic and strikingly similar to the way laypeople use Web-based general search engines. Markey states that “for the vast majority of people's information needs, doing one's own searching is convenient, immediate and instantaneous—connect to the Internet, launch a Web browser, type a query into a search engine's dialog box, browse ranked retrievals, and link to one or more full-length retrieved documents” (Borlund, 2009, 71).

Vibert et al. (2007) used individual questionnaires and interviews to demonstrate that as other life scientists, French neuroscientists make a massive use of online bibliographic resources. Their preferred online resources for work-related information were PubMed and the Google search engine. Neuroscientists used them with a variety of objectives, but the swiftness of searches was a decisive factor to determine the usefulness of an online resource. The neuroscientists who were interviewed were asked to give examples of online bibliographic searches they had recently done (unpublished data). PubMed was used in 19 out of the 22 examples and three keywords in average were included in each query. The goal of two thirds of the searches was to find “a few references” or “the most recent references” on a topic, ...