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Review
. 2014:1159:11-31.
doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0709-0_2.

Accessing biomedical literature in the current information landscape

Ritu Khare  1 , Robert Leaman, Zhiyong Lu
Affiliations
Review

Accessing biomedical literature in the current information landscape

Ritu Khare et al. Methods Mol Biol. 2014.

Abstract

Biomedical and life sciences literature is unique because of its exponentially increasing volume and interdisciplinary nature. Biomedical literature access is essential for several types of users including biomedical researchers, clinicians, database curators, and bibliometricians. In the past few decades, several online search tools and literature archives, generic as well as biomedicine specific, have been developed. We present this chapter in the light of three consecutive steps of literature access: searching for citations, retrieving full text, and viewing the article. The first section presents the current state of practice of biomedical literature access, including an analysis of the search tools most frequently used by the users, including PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and Embase, and a study on biomedical literature archives such as PubMed Central. The next section describes current research and the state-of-the-art systems motivated by the challenges a user faces during query formulation and interpretation of search results. The research solutions are classified into five key areas related to text and data mining, text similarity search, semantic search, query support, relevance ranking, and clustering results. Finally, the last section describes some predicted future trends for improving biomedical literature access, such as searching and reading articles on portable devices, and adoption of the open access policy.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The Three Steps of Biomedical Literature Access (a) Searching the literature and reviewing results using a search tool (e.g. PubMed), (b) Retrieving the full-text on a literature archive (e.g., PubMed Central), (c) Consuming the article on a viewing media (e.g. PubTator)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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