Analysis of information needs of users of the Stanford Health Information Network for Education

OBJECTIVE To examine the information needs of users of the Stanford Health Information Network for Education (SHINE), an integrated information retrieval (IR) system. METHODS A subset of queries from the SHINE log were categorized into one or more of 33 categories. RESULTS Drugs and infectious disease accounted for 25% of categorizations, and otherwise the distribution of categorizations was quite broad. CONCLUSIONS Attention should be paid to the selection of drug information resources in medical knowledge information retrieval systems. The distribution of query categorizations also suggests that IR systems include a wide range of knowledge resources.