Changing face of Medline
Definitions
3 key places to go for improving searches
Medline typical record
MeSH chemicals tree hierarchy
Chemical Tree Changes
MeSH Typical Record
A useful indexing database is either updating or dying!
MeSH terms update criteria
Add - Plants added to MeSH
Add – new disease, AIDS
Add & Change - Flavonoids
Splitting - more granularity
Splitting up is hard to do
Splitting – value to searchers
How can you keep up? How improve your searches?
Search is an art of balance:
Computers not as understanding as people
Searching the right words
Antiemetics MeSH page
Antiinflammator MeSH page
QUIRK - word stemming
Go to details to see how search interpreted
Details view - sweeteners
Details view - sweetener*
Sweetening Agents MeSH record
QUIRK – noun primacy over author
Searchterm [tag]
QUIRK – brackets
Ambiguity plays havoc
Implications of anomalies for data mining
Waste data ....
‘waste data’ is a new haystack to mine!
Data & its organization is continually updating so….
Summary: 3 key places
Precision Recall Tradeoff
QUIRK – related terms
Changes - drift in meaning
Changes - dual meaning
Ambiguity - momordica
Getting to MeSH browser
Search Explosion
MeSH browser - PA explode
Tips for authors
MeSH Database use
MeSH group at NLM
Email: BearS@mail.nlm.nih.gov
Home Page: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/bear.html