Due to intensive growth of the electronically available publications in the last few decades, bibliographic databases have become widespread. They cover a large variety of knowledge fields and provide a fast access to the wide variety of data. At the same time they contain a wealth of hidden knowledge that requires steps of extra processing in order to infer it. In this work we focus on extract...

A database is electronic information. Perhaps one of the most important information sources in medicine is that which is accessed electronically through a database named MEDLINE, the core medical literature published since 1966. MEDLINE is sold by three major vendors (BRS, Dialog, and the National Library of Medicine) to information experts and to medical experts. Information experts (librarian...

We recently designed and deployed a metasearch engine, Metta, that sends queries and retrieves search results from five leading biomedical databases: PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. Because many articles are indexed in more than one of these databases, it is desirable to deduplicate the retrieved article records. This is not a trivial pro...

Modern bibliographic databases provide the basis for scientific research and its evaluation. While their content and structure differ substantially, there exist only informal notions on their reliability. Here we compare the topological consistency of citation networks extracted from six popular bibliographic databases including Web of Science, CiteSeer and arXiv.org. The networks are assessed ...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to determine whether the number of bibliographic databases used to search the health sciences literature in individual systematic reviews (SRs) and meta-analyses (MAs) changed over a twenty-year period related to the official 1995 launch of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR). METHODS Ovid MEDLINE was searched using a modified version of...

The Internet has created new opportunities for librarians to present literature search results to clinicians. In order to take full advantage of these opportunities, libraries need to create locally maintained bibliographic databases. A simple method of creating a local bibliographic database and publishing it on the Web is described. The method uses off-the-shelf software and requires minimal ...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to make a comparative description of the evolution and distribution of international research into pharmacoepidemiology, using three bibliographic databases, in order to select the most appropriate for future bibliometric studies. METHODS Bibliographic searches were performed using the following databases: Medline (1966-99), IPA (1970-99) and SCI (1990...

BACKGROUND We frequently fail to identify articles relevant to the subject of acute kidney injury (AKI) when searching the large bibliographic databases such as PubMed, Ovid Medline or Embase. To address this issue, we used computer automation to create information search filters to better identify articles relevant to AKI in these databases. METHODS We first manually reviewed a sample of 22 ...

Scientific numeric databases are important research tools for materials scientists. In distinction to bibliographic databases, these numeric databases are useful primarily to provide direct, immediate access to data, often evaluated data. Examples showing the application of crystallographic databases are given, including determining candidate materials for certain applications. Thermo-chemical ...