Comparison of SUNY and MEDLINE searches

One hundred sixty-five search requests processed through the SUNY Biomedical Communication Network were analyzed to determine how many of the citations thus retrieved would have been retrievable by MEDLINE. The results showed that MEDLINE would have been capable of retrieving 78.7% of the SUNY citations. Almost half of the 21.3% of the citations not retrievable by MEDLINE were from foreign-language journals. A subject analysis of the data showed that in most subject areas MEDLINE was able to provide a relatively small percentage of the journal titles generated by SUNY. These few titles, however, contained a large percentage of the SUNY citations involved in the study.     

The quality and impact of MEDLINE searches performed by end users

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