Information Value and Quality for the Health Sector: A Case Study of Search Strategies for Optimal Information Retrieval

The approaches of information value and quality can be discussed in any area of activity. The health sector is one of them, and the scientific literature has always been seen as a valuable tool in patient care. A number of studies highlight the impact of scientific literature on clinical decision-making and patient care costs. An important part of the literature in question is a result of online literature searching. The PubMed database contains over 22 million citations for biomedical literature and is widely used. The author, therefore, present its main features and review the leading studies developed to evaluate the retrieved information and to find optimal search strategies. Finally, she presents a study in the specific area of critical care, describing the strategies used by a group of doctors and the retrieval results achieved on two different occasions.