Searching for the most relevant information in MEDLINE just got easier
Research funded by The Kidney Foundation of Canada and led by kidney specialists at Lawson Health Research Institute and The University of Western Ontario will make it possible for doctors to quickly and effectively access information relevant for patient care. These research findings have been released this week in the print version of the renowned British Medical Journal (BMJ).
"Our study shows that MEDLINE, the database most used by doctors to guide patient care, can be filtered in a reliable manner for patient relevant information," says Dr. Amit Garg, a London Health Sciences Centre nephrologist and epidemiologist, Lawson scientist, associate professor with the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at The University of Western Ontario and Clinician Scientist with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Previous attempts to filter the database for a clinical discipline have been limited.
As of February 2009, the MEDLINE multi-purpose electronic database contained information on 18 million articles from 5,363 different journals, with 12,500 new articles added each week. Finding relevant information is sometimes like finding 'a needle in a haystack'. A typical MEDLINE search retrieves a lot of irrelevant data and misses highly pertinent articles. One way to improve searching is to filter MEDLINE for a clinical discipline. The research team tested over one million 'renal' filters, using an empiric approach to discover those with high performance.