End-user searching in medicine.

Investigation of end-user searching at the New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center (NYH-CUMC) revealed that 8% of the physicians surveyed were end users, 63% were interested in learning to search, and 29% were not interested. When training sessions were offered at the Burke Rehabilitation Center, an affiliated institution, 50% of the medical staff attended at least one class, but only 7% of the total staff became frequent searchers. Analysis of the precision and recall ratios of searches conducted by five end users at HYH-CUMC indicated that the best results were obtained by end users who had been taught to search by experienced librarian-searchers. The quality of end user searches did not appear to be affected by the "friendliness" of the systems used, the frequency of searching habits, or the length of time that an end user had been searching.