Abstract
AbstractWith increasing number of bibliographic software, scientists and health professionals either make a subjective choice of tool(s) that could suit their needs or face a challenge of analyzing multiple features of a plethora of search programs. There is an urgent need for a thorough comparative analysis of the available bio-literature scanning tools, from the user’s perspective. We report results of the first time semi-quantitative comparison of 21 programs, which can search published (partial or full text) documents in life science areas. The observations can assist life science researchers and medical professionals to make an informed selection among the programs, depending on their search objectives. Some of the important findings are: 1. Most of the hits obtained from Scopus, ReleMed, EBImed, CiteXplore, and HighWire Press were usually relevant (i.e. these tools show a better precision than other tools). 2. But a very high number of relevant citations were retrieved by HighWire Press, Google Scholar, CiteXplore and Pubmed Central (they had better recall). 3. HWP and CiteXplore seemed to have a good balance of precision and recall efficiencies. 4. PubMed Central, PubMed and Scopus provided the most useful query systems. 5. GoPubMed, BioAsk, EBIMed, ClusterMed could be more useful among the tools that can automatically process the retrieved citations for further scanning of bio-entities such as proteins, diseases, tissues, molecular interactions, etc. The authors suggest the use of PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar and HighWire Press - for better coverage, and GoPubMed - to view the hits categorized based on the MeSH and gene ontology terms. The article is relavant to all life science subjects.
Highlights
Efficient search of published scientific articles is a key facilitator of the cur rent speed of discoveries in life sciences, and important for successful health management
The authors suggest the use of PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar and HighWire Press - for better coverage, and GoPubMed - to view the hits categorized based on the MeSH and gene ontology terms
Users face a new challenge with the increase in the number of novel tools: they have to acquaint with multiple features of a plethora of search tools
Summary
Efficient search of published scientific articles is a key facilitator of the cur rent speed of discoveries in life sciences, and important for successful health management. Several databases and search engines (see table 1) have been created to enhance the efficiency of scanning published articles and retrieving the relevant cita tions. Users face a new challenge with the increase in the number of novel tools: they have to acquaint with multiple features of a plethora of search tools. In this context, a systematic comparative study of different utilities of the available search tools would be helpful. Some studies have compared the search tools from a user’s perspective. Such studies have considered very few search tools and often in the context of one specific domain. A thorough application-based assessment of all major literature mining softwares, preferably a quantitative one, would help many scientists and physicians
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