Describes a study of 77 abstracts in English language medical journals that was conducted to examine the internal structuring of the abstracts. A form for structured abstracts is described, the importance of abstracts in medical journals is discussed, and structural flaws in the abstracts studied are described. (24 references) (LRW)

Users of seven MEDLINE information centers were investigated in terms of characteristics, motivations, purposes and expectations in using the service. (Author)

The structure and interrelations of the biomedical journal literature are investigated as a preparatory step for studies of biomedical research activity. (Author)

Reports the results of experiments with MEDLINE that used lexical statistics such as word-frequency counts to discover hidden connections in medical literature. Discusses problems with relying on bibliographic citations or standard indexing methods to establish a relationship between topics that might profitably be explored by scientific research.…

Investigates the phenomena of concept similarity and conceptual information alteration in medical translation of article titles as information transfers between English and Chinese. Results showed the loss of conceptual information was much greater than the gain in both English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation, and there were two…

Discusses the problem of fraud in scientific research and provides background on the medical research fraud case of John Darsee in 1981. Results of analysis of citations to Darsee's publications are reported, indicating that his work continues to be cited positively; and the dangers of fraudulent research are considered. (28 references) (MES)

This study conducted a crosslanguage analysis of conceptual alteration in medical translation between English and Chinese, focusing on the original and translated concepts in article titles from two English medical journals and two Chinese medical journals. Findings provide insights into future studies on crosslanguage information retrieval via…

Reports on the history of bibliometrics, citation indexing, and citation analysis in the legal field. Private and commercial ventures dating back to the nineteenth century, the influence of legal bibliometrics on bibliometrics in other fields, and possibilities for future development of legal citation analysis are discussed. (27 references) (LRW)

Two articles discuss the clustering of composite representations in the Cystic Fibrosis Document Collection from the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE file. Clustering is evaluated as a function of the exhaustivity of composite representations based on Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and citation indexes, and evaluation of retrieval…

Describes a fully automated approach for indexing documents that is based on associating textwords in a training set of bibliographic citations with the indexing of journals. Discusses the use of journal descriptors (JDs) in the MEDLINE database that could also be used to search other journal articles, monographs, and Web documents. (Author/LRW)

Discusses topical relevance and situational relevance, which takes into account the impact of the retrieval system on the user, in the context of medicine. Topics addressed include scientific validity; limitations of current evaluation methodology, including recall and precision; and a framework for future retrieval research based on an…

Describes types of full-text databases in medicine; discusses features for searching full-text journal databases available through online vendors; reviews research on full-text databases in medicine; and describes the MEDLINE/Full-Text Research Project at the University of Missouri (Columbia) which investigated precision, recall, and relevancy.…

Discussion of evidence-based medicine (EBM) focuses on information tools to facilitate the practice of EBM that were developed, evaluated, and made more accessible by the McMaster University (Canada) Faculty of Health Sciences. Highlights include users' guides to medical literature, strategies for improving MEDLINE searches, new journals, and…

Describes a study that investigated the use of a natural language processing technique called noun phrasing to determine whether it is a viable technique for medical information retrieval. Evaluates four noun phrase generation tools for their ability to isolate noun phrases from medical journal abstracts, focusing on precision and recall.…