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© 2014. This work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Background: PubMed contains numerous articles in languages other than English. However, existing solutions to access these articles in the language in which they were written remain unconvincing.

Objective: The aim of this study was to propose a practical search engine, called Multilingual PubMed, which will permit access to a PubMed subset in 1 language and to evaluate the precision and coverage for the French version (Multilingual PubMed-French).

Methods: To create this tool, translations of MeSH were enriched (eg, adding synonyms and translations in French) and integrated into a terminology portal. PubMed subsets in several European languages were also added to our database using a dedicated parser. The response time for the generic semantic search engine was evaluated for simple queries. BabelMeSH, Multilingual PubMed-French, and 3 different PubMed strategies were compared by searching for literature in French. Precision and coverage were measured for 20 randomly selected queries. The results were evaluated as relevant to title and abstract, the evaluator being blind to search strategy.

Results: More than 650,000 PubMed citations in French were integrated into the Multilingual PubMed-French information system. The response times were all below the threshold defined for usability (2 seconds). Two search strategies (Multilingual PubMed-French and 1 PubMed strategy) showed high precision (0.93 and 0.97, respectively), but coverage was 4 times higher for Multilingual PubMed-French.

Conclusions: It is now possible to freely access biomedical literature using a practical search tool in French. This tool will be of particular interest for health professionals and other end users who do not read or query sufficiently in English. The information system is theoretically well suited to expand the approach to other European languages, such as German, Spanish, Norwegian, and Portuguese.

Details

Title
A Search Engine to Access PubMed Monolingual Subsets: Proof of Concept and Evaluation in French
Author
Griffon, Nicolas  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Schuers, Matthieu  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Lina Fatima Soualmia  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Grosjean, Julien  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Kerdelhué, Gaétan  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Kergourlay, Ivan  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Dahamna, Badisse  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Stéfan Jacques Darmoni  VIAFID ORCID Logo 
Section
Information Retrieval
Publication year
2014
Publication date
Dec 2014
Publisher
Gunther Eysenbach MD MPH, Associate Professor
e-ISSN
1438-8871
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2512904474
Copyright
© 2014. This work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.