Mastrangelo Giuseppe, Fadda Emanuela, Rossi Carlo R, Zamprogno Emanuele, Buja Alessandra, Cegolon Luca
Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Padua University, 35128 Padua, Italy.
BMC Res Notes. 2010 May 10;3:131. doi: 10.1186/1756-0500-3-131.
Within the context of a European network dedicated to the study of sarcoma the relevant literature on sarcoma risk factors was collected by searching PubMed and Google Scholar, the two information storage and retrieval databases which can be accessed without charge. The present study aims to appraise the relative proficiency of PubMed and Google Scholar.
Unlike PubMed, Google Scholar does not allow a choice between "Human" and "Animal" studies, nor between "Classical" and other types of studies. As a result, searches with Google Scholar produced high numbers of citations that have to be filtered. Google Scholar resulted in a higher sensitivity (proportion of relevant articles, meeting the search criteria), while PubMed in a higher specificity (proportion of lower quality articles not meeting the criteria, that are not retrieved). Concordance between Google Scholar and PubMed was as low as 8%.
This study focused just on one topic. Although further studies are warranted, PM and GS appear to be complementary and their integration could greatly improve the search of references in medical research.
在一个致力于肉瘤研究的欧洲网络背景下，通过搜索PubMed和谷歌学术这两个可免费访问的信息存储与检索数据库，收集了有关肉瘤风险因素的相关文献。本研究旨在评估PubMed和谷歌学术的相对效能。
与PubMed不同，谷歌学术不允许在“人类”和“动物”研究之间进行选择，也不允许在“经典”和其他类型的研究之间进行选择。因此，使用谷歌学术进行搜索会产生大量需要筛选的引用。谷歌学术的敏感性更高（符合搜索标准的相关文章比例），而PubMed的特异性更高（未检索到的不符合标准的低质量文章比例）。谷歌学术和PubMed之间的一致性低至8%。
本研究仅关注一个主题。尽管有必要进行进一步研究，但PubMed和谷歌学术似乎具有互补性，将它们整合可以大大改善医学研究中参考文献的搜索。
