Islamaj Dogan Rezarta, Murray G Craig, Névéol Aurélie, Lu Zhiyong
National Center for Biotechnology Information, US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA.
Database (Oxford). 2009;2009:bap018. doi: 10.1093/database/bap018. Epub 2009 Nov 27.
This article reports on a detailed investigation of PubMed users' needs and behavior as a step toward improving biomedical information retrieval. PubMed is providing free service to researchers with access to more than 19 million citations for biomedical articles from MEDLINE and life science journals. It is accessed by millions of users each day. Efficient search tools are crucial for biomedical researchers to keep abreast of the biomedical literature relating to their own research. This study provides insight into PubMed users' needs and their behavior. This investigation was conducted through the analysis of one month of log data, consisting of more than 23 million user sessions and more than 58 million user queries. Multiple aspects of users' interactions with PubMed are characterized in detail with evidence from these logs. Despite having many features in common with general Web searches, biomedical information searches have unique characteristics that are made evident in this study. PubMed users are more persistent in seeking information and they reformulate queries often. The three most frequent types of search are search by author name, search by gene/protein, and search by disease. Use of abbreviation in queries is very frequent. Factors such as result set size influence users' decisions. Analysis of characteristics such as these plays a critical role in identifying users' information needs and their search habits. In turn, such an analysis also provides useful insight for improving biomedical information retrieval.Database URL:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed.
本文报告了对PubMed用户需求和行为的详细调查，作为改善生物医学信息检索的一步。PubMed为研究人员提供免费服务，可获取来自MEDLINE和生命科学期刊的1900多万篇生物医学文章的参考文献。每天有数百万用户访问它。高效的搜索工具对于生物医学研究人员跟上与其自身研究相关的生物医学文献至关重要。本研究深入了解了PubMed用户的需求及其行为。这项调查是通过分析一个月的日志数据进行的，这些数据包含超过2300万个用户会话和超过5800万个用户查询。通过这些日志中的证据详细描述了用户与PubMed交互的多个方面。尽管生物医学信息搜索与一般网络搜索有许多共同特征，但本研究中也凸显了其独特之处。PubMed用户在寻求信息时更有毅力，并且经常重新制定查询。最常见的三种搜索类型是按作者姓名搜索、按基因/蛋白质搜索和按疾病搜索。查询中使用缩写非常频繁。诸如结果集大小等因素会影响用户的决策。对这些特征的分析在识别用户的信息需求及其搜索习惯方面起着关键作用。反过来，这样的分析也为改善生物医学信息检索提供了有用的见解。数据库网址：http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed 。
