McCray Alexa T, Tse Tony
National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA.
AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2003;2003:430-4.
We examined queries that led to search failures on two National Library of Medicine Web-based consumer health sites, ClincialTrials.gov and MEDLINEplus. The purpose of the study was to analyze and categorize queries resulting that led to no results with the ultimate goal of developing interventions to assist users in recovering from those failures. We first analyzed over 2,700 queries, iteratively developing a coding scheme. We subsequently applied the codes to an additional set of 2,000 queries. We found that most of the queries were in scope, relevant to the system being searched, and did not exhibit so-called consumer language. As the final step, we developed a taxonomy based on whether the search failures were due primarily to content issues, to problems in query formulation, or to limitations of the search system. The results reported here have informed the further development of our own systems, and they may be helpful to others as they seek to improve consumer access to health information.
我们研究了在国立医学图书馆的两个基于网络的消费者健康网站ClinicalTrials.gov和MEDLINEplus上导致搜索失败的查询。该研究的目的是对导致无结果的查询进行分析和分类，最终目标是制定干预措施，帮助用户从这些失败中恢复过来。我们首先分析了2700多个查询，迭代地制定了一种编码方案。随后，我们将这些代码应用于另外2000个查询。我们发现，大多数查询都在范围内，与被搜索的系统相关，并且没有表现出所谓的消费者语言。作为最后一步，我们根据搜索失败主要是由于内容问题、查询表述问题还是搜索系统的限制，制定了一种分类法。这里报告的结果为我们自己系统的进一步开发提供了参考，并且在其他人寻求改善消费者获取健康信息的途径时，可能会对他们有所帮助。
