Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011:2011:693-700.
Epub 2011 Oct 22.

Development and evaluation of a prototype search engine to meet public health information needs

Jonathan W Keeling  1 , Anne M Turner, Eileen E Allen, Steven A Rowe, Jacqueline A Merrill, Elizabeth D Liddy, Howard R Turtle
Affiliations

Development and evaluation of a prototype search engine to meet public health information needs

Jonathan W Keeling et al. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2011.

Abstract

Grey literature is information not available through commercial publishers. It is a sizable and valuable information source for public health (PH) practice but because documents are not formally indexed the information is difficult to locate. Public Health Information Search (PHIS) was developed to address this problem. NLP techniques were used to create informative document summaries for an extensive collection of grey literature on PH topics. The system was evaluated with PH workers using the critical incident technique in a two stage field evaluation to assess effectiveness in comparison with Google. Document summaries were found to be both helpful and accurate. Increased document collection size and enhanced result rankings improved search effectiveness from 28% to 55%. PHIS would work best in conjunction with Google or another broad coverage Web search engine when searching for documents and reports as opposed to local health data and primary disease information. PHIS could enhance both the quality and quantity of PH search results.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
An example of a PHIS search result with the model summary shown
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
The PHIS results page for the query term “obesity”. PHIS collection results are on the left (with model summaries hidden), Google results are on the right.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Revere D, Turner A, Madhavan A, et al. Understanding the information needs of PH practitioners: A literature review to inform design of an interactive digital knowledge management system. JBI. 2007;40(4):410–421. - PubMed
    1. LaPelle N, Luckmann R, Simpson E, Martin E. Identifying strategies to improve access to credible and relevant information for PH professionals: a qualitative study. BMC PH. 2006;6(89) - PMC - PubMed
    1. Lasker R. Challenges to accessing useful information in health policy and PH: an introduction to a national forum held at the New York Academy of Medicine. J Urban Health. 1998;75:779–84. - PubMed
    1. GL ’99 Conference Program. Fourth International Conference on Grey Literature: New frontiers in grey literature. Washington, D.C. GreyNet, Grey Literature Network Service. 4–5 Oct. 1999.
    1. Tomaiuolo NG, Packer JG. Preprint servers: pushing the envelope of electronic scholarly publishing. Searcher. 2000;8(9)

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources