Alternative Search Methods to Retrieve Information on the Web

The scientific community is sensitive to concerns about how and why animals are used in biomedical research and testing. Although alternatives to methods based on the use of animals may not satisfy all the requirements of the biomedical research communities, alternatives to the use of vertebrates have been developed and validated. Research on such methodologies is aimed at refining procedures to reduce pain and discomfort, reducing the number of animals required to provide scientifically valuable results, and replacing live vertebrates when an alternative methodology can be verified and validated by the scientific community (the 3Rs). NLM’s ALTBIB (Hudson et al., 2002) is a searchable bibliographic collection on alternatives to animal testing. It includes citations from published articles, books, book chapters, and technical reports from 1992 to 2001. Citations were selected manually after searching various NLM bibliographic databases. The selection of citations involved further review and verification by subject specialists to ensure relevance and quality. The bibliography features citations concerning methods, tests, assays, and procedures that may prove useful in establishing alternatives to the use of intact vertebrates. In 2001, several enhancements were made to MEDLINE to facilitate the information retrieval of animal alternatives literature. These included the addition of new MeSH main headings on the animal alternatives subjects. Several important journals relevant to animal alternatives were added to the journals indexed for MEDLINE. Since the introduction of these enhancements in MEDLINE and MeSH, ALTBIB has not been updated. Believing that users would be able to search and retrieve directly from MEDLINE/PubMed, it was decided that the effort to manually curate an extensive bibliography was no longer justifiable. Furthermore, the manually created bibliography was limited by the fact that it was never current, but rather became obsolete as soon as produced. Later study (Grune et al., 2002) showed that the literature relevant to animal alternatives was not easily retrievable. While the new MeSH terms were used, on the whole, to indicate the topics discussed in the citation, many relevant articles would not be Alternative Search Methods to Retrieve Information on the Web