[Use of data processing cards for information retrieval from medical documents. Case reports, bibliographic references, series of observations (author's transl)].

The authors have given pride of place to an old system, punched cards selectors, which are fairly inexpensive to run, and are very flexible in their use. Each card has a part reserved for identification purposes (a case report number or a dated reference to an indexed list of articles) and another part for identification of a certain number of key-words with their corresponding numerical codings, which are also listed in a thesaurus. These key-words serve both for classifying case reports from each department, and for the bibliographic reference cards. When a series of cases are being studied. However, a new thesaurus has to be established during the course of the study. The 960 possible perforations on the international IBM card are largely sufficient as the number of key-words (case reports or bibliographic card-index codings) is not more than 700 and it is unusual to require more than 900 items during the course of a study. The authors find this system very satisfactory and no longer use large computers.