Haynes R B, McKibbon K A, Walker C J, Mousseau J, Baker L M, Fitzgerald D, Guyatt G, Norman G R
Ann Intern Med. 1985 Nov;103(5):812-6. doi: 10.7326/0003-4819-103-5-812.
Although clinicians can now search the medical literature electronically from the clinic, bedside, or operating suite, little is known about the performance characteristics of online information services. Fourteen access routes to the MEDLINE database of journal literature were compared for retrieval quantity and quality, user and online search time, and cost for randomly ordered, standardized searches on common clinical problems. All routes produced the articles we judged to be the most definitive on the clinical problem. However, routes differed significantly (p less than 0.01) for the same searches with respect to online time (range, 5.15 to 18.72 minutes), total search time (8.37 to 20.55 minutes), cost (US $3.38 to $11.62), and proportion of articles relevant to the topic (98% to 75%). "User friendliness" aside, our results showed that the higher the cost, the worse the product. Clinicians should consider these major differences when deciding which search system to use.
虽然临床医生现在可以在诊所、床边或手术室通过电子方式检索医学文献，但对于在线信息服务的性能特征却知之甚少。我们比较了14种访问期刊文献MEDLINE数据库的途径，以了解其检索数量和质量、用户及在线搜索时间，以及针对常见临床问题进行随机排序的标准化搜索的成本。所有途径都找到了我们认为对临床问题最具权威性的文章。然而，对于相同的搜索，各途径在在线时间（范围为5.15至18.72分钟）、总搜索时间（8.37至20.55分钟）、成本（3.38美元至11.62美元）以及与主题相关的文章比例（98%至75%）方面存在显著差异（p小于0.01）。撇开“用户友好性”不谈，我们的结果表明成本越高，产品质量越差。临床医生在决定使用哪种搜索系统时应考虑这些主要差异。
