Abstract
This article reports on a detailed investigation of PubMed users’ needs and behavior as a step toward improving biomedical information retrieval. PubMed is providing free service to researchers with access to more than 19 million citations for biomedical articles from MEDLINE and life science journals. It is accessed by millions of users each day. Efficient search tools are crucial for biomedical researchers to keep abreast of the biomedical literature relating to their own research. This study provides insight into PubMed users’ needs and their behavior. This investigation was conducted through the analysis of one month of log data, consisting of more than 23 million user sessions and more than 58 million user queries. Multiple aspects of users’ interactions with PubMed are characterized in detail with evidence from these logs. Despite having many features in common with general Web searches, biomedical information searches have unique characteristics that are made evident in this study. PubMed users are more persistent in seeking information and they reformulate queries often. The three most frequent types of search are search by author name, search by gene/protein, and search by disease. Use of abbreviation in queries is very frequent. Factors such as result set size influence users’ decisions. Analysis of characteristics such as these plays a critical role in identifying users’ information needs and their search habits. In turn, such an analysis also provides useful insight for improving biomedical information retrieval.Database URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed
Highlights
IntroductionNew knowledge is primarily presented and disseminated in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles
In biomedical research, new knowledge is primarily presented and disseminated in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles
Our results suggest that specialized techniques might be more effective for answering requests of PubMed users
Summary
New knowledge is primarily presented and disseminated in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles. Searching through literature to keep up with the state of the art is a task of increasing difficulty for many individual biomedical researchers. The challenge is ever increasing, both in the scope of topical coverage and in the fast-growing volume of biomedical literature [1]. New and expanding areas of research are being reported in a growing number of journals [2]. Expansion of the Internet and of broadband technologies is providing users with faster and easier access to online resources. PubMed, a free Web service provided by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), provides daily access to over 18-million biomedical citations for millions of users
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