Information Retrieval

In this module, use your blog to reflect on the following questions:
1. Describe your clinical problem and choice of electronic index. How did the index facilitate (or impede) your ability to construct an efficient search? How time consuming was your search? Would there be barriers to using the index in daily practice?

I chose a clinical treatment problem that I am currently working on in another class, being that of gastoresophageal reflux disease, since this will enable me to supplement my paper with additional references. Normally, I'd make it easy on myself and use an electronic index that I'm a little more familiar with being that of CINAHL, but this was an opportunity to expand my horizons so I chose to give PubMed a try. After watching both PubMed tutorials, I felt pretty comfortable using the search application. I found it relatively easy to use and providing you know what Boolean operators are and how to use them, it is easy to find a tremendous amount of information on the topic I was searching. The search itself was not very time consuming, however when it came to importing it to my EndNote program that was a totally different story. I've used CINAHL before which saves your searches and e-mails them to your account where you can simply upload them to EndNote. For some reason PubMed didn't seem to want to do this quite as easily, which resulted in taking over an hour to finally get it to work. Without having this process pre-estabilished this could easily become a barrier if you were under tight time constraints. Other than having to create an account to utilize all the options I really don't see any other serious time consuming aspect to the process. The indes itself is similar to CINAHL, allowing you to precisely search by authors, article code, publication dates, and of course specific key words or phrases. I will be sure to attach the "Import" process in my blog for anyone else who is having problems with that process as well.

2. What features in your chosen reference management software can be used to sort, classify, and otherwise organize references? Describe software functionality that allows you to better organize and share information for efficient retrieval and use.

Endnote allows you to create several bibliographies in one Word document as well as allowing you to specify the end of chapters or end of document. I created and labelled additional libraries by adding them on the left tab bar. It allows you to easily highlight and transfer references from one file to another. I can organize my references by author, year, Journal or reference type to name the main methods. You can also organize references by the type of search engine used. It also enables the ability to link to full text articles.
This bibliography and management maker allows the user to format citations, figures and tables right into Word with the “Cite While Your Write” feature.
It allows me to format, retrieve, import and export more than ten references from a remote database.
I am able to e-mail directly to this program, which also allows me to organize and store my full text files. I can also organize figures, including charts, tables pictures and equations. (Endnote.com, 2010).


When your logged in you have several features at the top of the screen after conducting your search you simply hit “Save Search” then hit “Save” You can then receive e-mail updates of specific to your searches you’ve saved and can even select how often you want them e-mailed to whatever e-mail you specify. You can also go in and change under the “settings” option any of these options. The “Last Searched” option shows how many days ago the search was conducted. To review any of the saved searches you just pick one and click on it. Using this same screen you can modify and delete any searches as well. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can be used to e-mail new results to anyone using the RSS feed readers. I have not personally tried this but understand the concept and feel it would be useful if one were conducting a longer term study/research where such an exchange would benefit several participants. So in addition to saving your searches, One can Sort and classify your results by developing a “collection” which has recently been increased from 500 to 5000. You can adjust your filters and links to free text articles from this application page as well.

3 You used an electronic index, a guideline index, and a web search engine to retrieve information relevant to your clinical problem. Compare and contrast your results. Which resources were useful/ not useful for your information retrieval task, and why? Identify some alternative strategies for retrieving relevant information - would context relevant information retrieval be useful? (You must be fairly detailed here, so that your blog entry evidences your use of NGC and google).
NGC Search test


When using the NGC (National Guideline Clearinghouse) search – under the general search using the same search terms (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease GERD) produced only 31 results. None of the articles were published before 2007. The website did provide a link to full free articles (e.g. for Role of endoscopy in the management of GERD.) Only eleven of the first twenty articles were directly related to the search topic. It would not allow me to view the next eleven results as it repeatedly said an “Error” occurred while processing the request.
After attempting to obtain more specific articles I used the “Detailed Search” and used only minimal “limits” which resulted in zero articles.
Limits used:
Keyword: Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease GERD
Intended Users: Advanced Practice Nurses
Methods Used to Analyze the Evidence: Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials
Publication Date(s): 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007
Sort Order: Relevance
Google Search test
The search (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease GERD) yielded 582,000 results. Despite the large number of results, most of the them consisted of websites containing various related information to the disease. These sites would not be considered appropriate resources for scientific or professional research papers, however can be quite useful to the likely audience they are intended, being that of generally uninformed consumers looking to obtain related information. For my particular purpose the general Google search was not useful.
An alternative to this search and to supplement this test I attempted to conduct the same search in Google Scholar which produced 71,300 results. Google scholar does provide an advanced search option that allows one to search by Author, Publication, Date, Collections and Journals. Upon attempting to look up specific articles I found that most using this search tool only provided abstracts and required registration / payment for most useful articles. I would not use this particular tool if this was found to be the rule rather than the exception.
As evidenced by the quality and quantity of results the electronic index (PubMed) was the most useful tool. It produced the most relevant and subsequently useful information specific to the topic searched. It required the least amount of time to sort through the data, allowing more time to analyze the information provided rather than searching for the articles themselves. I can state with a great deal of certainty, that while I continue to have free access to electronic indexes, I will continue to use them as an initial and preferred method of researching for information. I have determined that the use of such context relevant information retrieval is undoubtedly the most technical and subsequently accurate and useful tool to use for such specific searches. Google appears to be a relatively context insensitive tool when it comes to producing really specific results, which validates my rationale to not rely on it for my professional works.