Christina Magnifico LI804 Literature Review: Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography Scope of the Literature

Information retrieval systems are an integral aspect of scientific research and have increasingly been used in clinical settings. Although the literature on this particular topic is broad, three main themes presented themselves during the research process. The themes are: the evaluation of medical information retrieval systems, health science professionals use of medical information retrieval systems and performing search queries in medical information retrieval systems. This literature review will focus on synthesizing the main themes of the literature, in order to provide those interested in information literacy in the health sciences with a starting point for providing instruction to clinicians and students. Evaluation of Medical Information Retrieval Systems Grandage, K. K., Slawson, D. C., & Shaughnessy, A. F. (2002). When less is more: a practical approach to searching for evidence-based answers. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 90(3), 298304. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC116402/ This article discusses how to assess the usefulness of the information returned from a system search and evaluates several information retrieval systems related to the health sciences. The authors include detailed information regarding the hierarchy of research design studies and discuss new approaches to information retrieval. The article includes sections on the role of the librarian and information literacy in the health sciences. This is a good starting point for new health science librarians, looking to familiarize themselves with the basics of information retrieval systems in medical libraries.

Masic, I., & Milinovic, K. (2012). On-line biomedical databases- the best source for quick search of the scientific information in the biomedicine. Acta Informatica Medica, 20(2), 7284. doi:10.5455/aim.2012.20.72-84 The authors provide detailed reviews for twenty scientific databases and categorize each database into one of three types: bibliographic, citation, full text. Several international databases are included in the reviews, and the authors provide landing page screenshots and external links to each database mentioned. The article also mentions search results for fourteen indexed journals from Bosnia and Herzegovina, which serve as examples of results pulled from each database. Since the study is translated, there are several grammatical errors throughout the article. However, the article is an excellent overview of the current medical databases available to information professionals and their patrons.

Health Science Professionals Use of Medical Information Retrieval Systems Hersh WR, H. D. (1998). How well do physicians use electronic information retrieval systems?: a framework for investigation and systematic review. Journal of the American Medical Association: JAMA, 280(15), 13471352. doi:10.1001/jama.280.15.1347 This investigative study assesses how competent physicians are in using information retrieval systems and provides a conceptual framework for applying the results. The methods of the study are described in detail and multiple data sets representing comparisons conducted throughout the study are presented in concise tables. The discussion utilizes results from three previous studies and synthesizes them with the results of the authors study. The study would be appropriately used by a health science library implementing a clinical librarian position or providing information literacy instruction to clinicians.
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Westbrook, J. I., Coiera, E. W., & Gosling, A. S. (2005). Do online information retrieval systems help experienced clinicians answer clinical questions? Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association: JAMIA, 12(3), 315321. doi:10.1197/jamia.M1717 The authors present an experimental study that assess the impact of clinicians use of online information retrieval systems on answering clinical questions. In the study, a small sample size is used and the clinicians were allowed access to six retrieval systems. The data presented in the article includes the search techniques used, the clinical scenarios given and documentation required of the clinician. A statistical analysis is included in the results, which shows a 21% improvement in clinicians answers to the provided questions. This particular study could be tailored to any academic library needing to produce a return of investment study for administrative or budgetary issues.

Performing Search Queries in Medical Information Retrieval Systems Alpi, K. M. (2005). Expert searching in public health. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 93(1), 97103. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC545128/ The author of this article investigates resources available to public health professionals and defines the terminology used by those in the public health professions. Discussed in this article are the differences in expert searching among databases and how the use of multiple databases often requires in-depth knowledge of the specific vocabulary used within each database. The article explains the need for health science librarians to be well-versed in searching for grey literature and knowledgeable about other Web-based resources. Any librarian working in the public health sector, or public health professionals new to on-line databases would find this article beneficial.
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Chung, G. Y. (2009). Sentence retrieval for abstracts of randomized controlled trials. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 9(10). doi:10.1186/1472-6947-9-10 Utilizing CRFs (Conditional Random Fields), this study explains the retrieval of the main sentences from abstracts of randomized clinical trials. The study provides tables of classification results that discuss the accuracy of different searches and defines the features of classification used in this particular study. This paper could be considered a crucial work for any medical reference librarian tasked with helping clinicians find information about the design of clinical studies. Lavin, M. A., Krieger, M. M., Meyer, G. A., Spasser, M. A., Cvitan, T., Reese, C. G., McNary, P. (2005). Development and evaluation of evidence-based nursing (EBN) filters and related databases. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 93(1), 104115. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC545129/ This article describes how developing four sets of filters for evidence-based nursing can ultimately increase the efficiency of clinicians searches and return more useful results. The study utilizes a multistep methodology and the filters used were vetted for both sensitivity and specificity. The authors discuss the benefit of discipline-specific filters for several scientific databases, but specifically focus on CINAHL for this study. The study resulted in a positive correlation between the use of filters and the usefulness of returned results, but since the study only focused on a single database a more thorough study may be needed.