Clement Yu | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

A tutorial on information retrieval: basic terms and concepts.

This informal tutorial is intended for investigators and students who would like to understand the workings of information retrieval systems, including the most frequently used search engines: PubMed and Google. Having a basic knowledge of the terms and concepts of information retrieval should improve the efficiency and productivity of searches. As well, this knowledge is needed in order to follow current research efforts in biomedical information retrieval and text mining that are developing new systems not only for finding documents on a given topic, but extracting and integrating knowledge across documents.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2004

A system for multiattribute drug product comparison.

We describe a system for multiattribute drug product searching. We then demonstrate the system's performance on sample queries, and evaluate the name-based similarity searching component. Ten drug names were used to query a database of existing drug names using five different retrieval methods. Retrieved names were merged into master lists and presented to 15 pharmacists. Pharmacists rated the similarity between the query name and each retrieved names on a scale of 1-5. We report the precision of our five different retrieval methods at 11 levels of recall. The best single measure was editex, with a precision of 17.4% averaged across 11 levels of recall. A regression model using four objective measures of similarity as predictors accounted for 40.6% of the variance in observed mean similarity ratings. Automated, multiattribute drug product searching may improve the effectiveness and efficiency of preapproval screening processes and thereby prevent medication errors.

Dosage Forms↗