An analysis of objective quality indicators on Year Book citations: implications for MEDLINE searchers.

Purpose: This study is an analysis of Mosby Year Book citations from Ovid Online's Comprehensive Core Medical Library (CCML). The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to determine whether Year Book citations were more likely to be judged "key" than non-Year Book citations by clinicians; and (2) to determine whether the MEDLINE record of Year Book citations evaluated as key contained objective quality indicators that searchers might use to target key articles.

Background: As part of the MEDLINE/Full-Text Research Project, health care professionals evaluated search output from CCML on a five-point scale.

Beyond relevance--characteristics of key papers for clinicians: an exploratory study in an academic setting.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine what factors beyond relevance influence a clinician's decision to choose to read one journal article over another in satisfying an information need.

Design: Seventeen health care providers were interviewed and then surveyed regarding the characteristics of key articles (those they would not want to miss). On a Likert scale, the clinicians graded forty-two characteristics for importance in the decision process.

Retrieving research studies: a comparison of bibliographic and full-text versions of the New England Journal of Medicine.

It has been established that subject searches of medical full-text databases obtain higher recall than subject searches in a bibliographic database. In this study we attempted to determine if the same rule might apply when searching for a non-subject parameter such as study design. A simultaneous search of bibliographic and full-text records from the New England Journal of Medicine provided data on the number of items retrieved by each kind of search.

The application of quality filters in searching the clinical literature: some possible heuristics.

Experienced searchers can help their patrons find the "best" by employing any of several techniques which might filter search results. Using a sample search on Alzheimer's Disease, this article describes and illustrates the following five objective indicators which might be considered signs of quality: methodological rigor, document attributes, peer review, journal reputation, and filtering at input. Sample techniques and results are presented for six databases: MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, SAMM, CCML, and JWAT.