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British socialite bloody nose12/7/2023 This phrase, too, has a variant, the single word “nosebleed.” Reversing the order of the words and moving from the adjectival to the noun form results in the noun-noun phrase “nose bleed.” The results of a search with “nose bleed” are different. Bloody nose is a phrase composed of an adjective and a noun. What is interesting about this example is that by using a grammatical variation of the original term, consumers would get a completely different set of results. This set of results is not of particular interest, because it illustrates that MEDLINE is not designed for consumers, as stated in the first paragraph. Most consumers would not see an obvious relationship between any of the terms listed and the topic, so they would likely choose the final option, “bloody nose.mp.” The result of this search was a single citation, which was about the effects of herbicides (the one with ROUNDUP above). When we clicked the box and entered the term “bloody nose,” the following list of terms was displayed: When this box is clicked, the system automatically attempts to map the search term to the most appropriate MeSH term. The OVID search screen has a box that allows users to choose the Map to Subject Heading option. Thus, the search term “bloody nose” retrieved no relevant documents. Browsing the related items revealed that the condition Branhamella was the focus of the new search, not the concept of bloody nose. “The Oral and Intratracheal Toxicities of ROUNDUP and Its Components to Rats”īecause these systems offered the option of clicking on Related Articles, our imagined consumers could retrieve some relevant items from the system by clicking on the title of an item with bloody nose in it. Some of the other irrelevant titles were: Consumers would find little of value in the other items in this set. One title contained the phrase “bloody nose” (“The Role of Branhamella Catarrhalis in the ‘Bloody-Nose Syndrome’ of Cynomolgus Macaques”). The details of the search when we entered “bloody nose” were:īloody (all fields) and nose (all fields) Although the interfaces of the two systems differ considerably, both perform the same search. The National Library of Medicine offers free access to MEDLINE from its home page through either Internet Grateful Med (IGM) or PubMed. We also tested two other phrases for which we recognized lexical variants (“pink eye” or “pinkeye” and “color blindness” or “color blind” and their British equivalents) on MEDLINE to determine if our initial query was idiosyncratic. The researchers used the topic “bloody nose” (scientific name, “epistaxis”) and two lexical variants to search a commercially available and a free system offering access to MEDLINE (OVID and PubMed) and on a sample of Websites consumers might access (MEDLINE plus, NetWellness,, Excite Health, and CBSHealthWatch). The data presented here showed that the expectation that all variants would be mapped to the MeSH term was not true. In fact, the management of such variants is still a topic of research. The early tests of information retrieval systems noted the problem of lexical variants, and one of the purposes of controlled vocabularies was to control for such grammatical variations. With knowledge about such mappings, health professionals might expect all lexical variants of a term to be mapped to a single form. Many of these mappings are from the extensive entry vocabulary of MeSH, described on the home page as “over 300,000 terms.” * Because of this large entry vocabulary, a search for “heart attack” now maps to “myocardial infarction,” a term consumers are unlikely to use. Health professionals knew that over the years MEDLINE has adopted a number of mappings from entry terms to the MeSH headings. When MEDLINE searching was restricted to the few who understood Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), medical terminology, and the intricacies of searching the database, there was little need to accommodate the uninitiated. Most health professionals recognize that patients and other consumers of health care information are not familiar with medical terminology.
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