Full-text databases in medicine

Abstract

The wide variety of full-text databases pertinent to medicine requires classification. The first distinction to be made is between those full-text databases which are full-text retrievable only and those which are both full-text retrievable and full-text searchable. The full-text searchable files may be further divided into four major groups: 1) The electronic version of factual books or directories; 2) those which reproduce textbooks and reference books; 3) the hybrid—often mixtures of full-text and bibliographic records; and 4) the full-text of medical journal articles. The software for searching full-text medical databases varies from vendor to vendor. More than 400 journal titles in full-text were available as of April 1995 but no one system contained all the full-text medical journal titles. Little research has been done on the efficacy of using full-text databases in the biomedical arena. The MEDLINE/Full-Text Project represents a multi-year effort to learn about the heuristics for searching full-text files of medical journal articles. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.