Title |
Is searching full text more effective than searching abstracts?
|
---|---|
Published in |
BMC Bioinformatics, February 2009
|
DOI | 10.1186/1471-2105-10-46 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Jimmy Lin |
Abstract |
With the growing availability of full-text articles online, scientists and other consumers of the life sciences literature now have the ability to go beyond searching bibliographic records (title, abstract, metadata) to directly access full-text content. Motivated by this emerging trend, I posed the following question: is searching full text more effective than searching abstracts? This question is answered by comparing text retrieval algorithms on MEDLINE abstracts, full-text articles, and spans (paragraphs) within full-text articles using data from the TREC 2007 genomics track evaluation. Two retrieval models are examined: bm25 and the ranking algorithm implemented in the open-source Lucene search engine. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United Kingdom | 5 | 56% |
United States | 2 | 22% |
Unknown | 2 | 22% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Members of the public | 5 | 56% |
Scientists | 2 | 22% |
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors) | 1 | 11% |
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) | 1 | 11% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United Kingdom | 4 | 2% |
United States | 4 | 2% |
Korea, Republic of | 1 | <1% |
Brazil | 1 | <1% |
Sweden | 1 | <1% |
Germany | 1 | <1% |
Mexico | 1 | <1% |
Netherlands | 1 | <1% |
Spain | 1 | <1% |
Other | 1 | <1% |
Unknown | 152 | 90% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Researcher | 35 | 21% |
Student > Ph. D. Student | 26 | 15% |
Student > Master | 26 | 15% |
Other | 13 | 8% |
Student > Bachelor | 11 | 7% |
Other | 35 | 21% |
Unknown | 22 | 13% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Computer Science | 59 | 35% |
Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 25 | 15% |
Medicine and Dentistry | 13 | 8% |
Social Sciences | 12 | 7% |
Business, Management and Accounting | 6 | 4% |
Other | 25 | 15% |
Unknown | 28 | 17% |