Information Retrieval: A Health and Biomedical Perspective.

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Watson, Linda A.
Copyright Year	2005
Abstract	William Hersh, professor and chair of the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), is internationally recognized for his work in the medical informatics field, especially in the development and evaluation of information retrieval systems for clinicians. He has coauthored more than eighty papers, several of them with librarian colleagues at OHSU, and coauthored a chapter on information retrieval systems in a book on medical informatics published in 2001 [1], which provides a much abbreviated view of the topic in thirty-three pages. In the seven years since the first edition of Information Retrieval, the information world has changed considerably, largely because of the Internet, a point the author notes in his preface by indicating that “this edition is profoundly re-written and is essentially a new book” (p. ix). Indeed the page count has increased by nearly 62%, although the 11 chapter headings provide a nearly identical framework, as do the appendixes. The author maintains a Website to report on errata and new developments in the field. The site also includes the full text of chapter 1, the complete bibliography, and the index. The errata page dated June 2003 contains a considerable list of both substantial errata as well as typographical errors. The update pages reflect significant new developments chapter by chapter, many of which draw from updates to a course the author teaches. This resource will be very valuable if the author is committed to maintaining it and, in fact, is already a useful site that readers can bookmark and scan periodically for their professional reading. The main goal of the book is “to provide an understanding of the theory, implementation, and evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems in health and biomedicine” (p. ix). The 11 chapters are divided into three parts, which flow from basic definitions of information retrieval and an overview of health and biomedical information, to a description of the current “state-of-the-art” in information retrieval, to a discussion of the major research and development trends in building better systems. The four appendixes revolve around a sample database of documents to illustrate concepts such as inverted files. The book also includes an extensive list of about 1,050 references and a subject index. Most health sciences librarians will be familiar with the basic concepts introduced in chapters 1 and 2, including an excellent overview of health and biomedical information as primary or secondary literature, the peer-review process, impact factors, evidence-based medicine, electronic publishing, and quality of health information on the Web. Chapter 3 contains a summary of system research and evaluation methodology that will be particularly valuable to librarians who evaluate information systems and resources with constrained budgets. It will also help as the profession develops its own knowledgebase of evidence-based librarianship. This summary sets the stage for chapter 7, in which the author reviews existing research, primarily in the clinical arena, on questions of system use, user satisfaction, and system impact, including MEDLINE impact studies conducted by librarians. One of the author's conclusions based on research to date is that “although healthcare IR systems are widely distributed and commercially successful, their true impact on healthcare providers and patient care is unknown” (p. 261). Chapters 4 through 6 address the state of the art in content (databases, full-text, Websites, images), indexing (controlled vocabularies, Unified Medical Language System, metadata, word indexing, Web crawling), and retrieval (search processes for different types of resources, Web search engines, information filtering). Again, most of this will be familiar territory for health sciences librarians, as it forms the basis for much of the teaching done with users. Only a brief mention is made of the National Center for Biotechnology Information's genomic resources, reflecting the book's bias toward retrieval of health care textual information as opposed to retrieval of research data. Research directions are the focus of the final four chapters. Some content of these chapters will stretch the knowledgebase of practicing health sciences librarians and be of more interest to library science and informatics researchers. It introduces specialized terminology and concepts relating to developments in lexical-statistical systems, which base indexing and retrieval on word stems in text (chapter 8), and linguistics systems, which base retrieval on natural language processing (chapter 9). Chapter 10, “Augmenting Systems for Users,” describes additional methods for improving the user interface, particularly across multiple resources including linking IR systems to the electronic medical record, and it has a section on digital libraries. The section on digital libraries is very brief and may raise some hackles by stating that “probably the main function of libraries is to maintain collections of published literature” (p. 387), but the author redeems himself later by observing, “One concern about digital libraries is access to the professionals who have always aided users of physical libraries …the value of professional assistance to users cannot be denied” (p. 389). Chapter 11 concludes the book with an introduction to the concept of information extraction, also known as text mining. The author focuses on extraction of content from the clinical narrative and briefly explores the use of information extraction techniques to facilitate scientific discovery. A review [2] of the first edition noted several limitations, including “the focus on medical as opposed to health sciences; the rather selective international coverage of general IR research …, the lack of information about medical IR systems in other countries; and the lack of coverage about issues in non-textual databases.” This statement remains largely true in the second edition, although a wider focus would have added that many more pages to an already hefty tome. Information Retrieval would be a useful addition to the shelves of academic libraries for both librarians and health professionals and students, if more depth of information is desired beyond “how-to-search” manuals. The chapters on system evaluation and research trends are particularly enlightening. Schools of library and information science and informatics programs should also consider this text a must for capturing the complexity of the intersection between information retrieval and medicine.
Starting Page	134
Ending Page	135
Page Count	2
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Volume Number	93
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Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article