Ranking the whole MEDLINE database according to a large training set using text indexing

Background: The MEDLINE database contains over 12 million references to scientific literature, ut 3/4 of recent articles including an abstract of the publication. Retrieval of entries using queries with keywords is useful for human users that need to obtain small selections. However, particular analyses of the literature or database developments may need the complete ranking of all the references in the MEDLINE database as to their relevance to a topic of interest. This report describes a method that does this ranking using the differences in word content between MEDLINE entries related to a topic and the whole of MEDLINE, in a computational time appropriate for an article search query engine. Results: We tested the capabilities of our system to retrieve MEDLINE references which are relevant to the subject of stem cells. We took advantage of the existing annotation of references with terms from the MeSH hierarchical vocabulary (Medical Subject Headings, developed at the National Libra...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Brian P. Suomela, Miguel A. Andrade
• Keywords: BMCBI 2005, Medline, MEDLINE Database, MEDLINE References