Access to online information is extraordinarily useful to biomedical researchers - and thanks to a new development, it's now even simpler to access one of the world's largest and most-used scientific databases, the National Library of Medicine's Medline.
Grateful Med, the software currently used by more than 90,000 subscribers to reach Medline and other National Library of Medicine (NLM) databases, is gaining a sidekick on the World Wide Web, appropriately called Internet Grateful Med. Set for production release in April, Internet Grateful Med is already netting positive reviews from NIH's WorldWideWeb Interest Group [see box below] and from intramural researchers who were given early access to the final testing, or "beta," version.
Original vs. InternetInternet Grateful Med is both easier to use and more powerful than the original Grateful Med program. Unlike its forerunner, the initial version of Internet Grateful Med conducts searches only in Medline. However, NLM is already testing a follow-on version that searches several additional databases. Internet Grateful Med has better capabilities for picking and choosing records for output. You can print, save, or e-mail results using normal Web browser functions. Context-sensitive online help is available throughout the program. The original Grateful Med came in PC (DOS) and Macintosh versions. In contrast, Internet Grateful Med can be used from any computer with Internet access and a compatible Web browser, including Unix workstations. You can even access it using the Lynx character-mode browser from a dumb terminal! In its current form, Internet Grateful Med helps the user create, submit, and refine a search in Medline. The user can search by subject, by text word in the title, or by author name. Searches can be limited by language, publication type, study group, age group, or range of years back to 1966. Internet Grateful Med offers direct links to the full text of Clinical Practice Guidelines supported by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research and to nearly 60,000 online images from NLM's History of Medicine Division. Searching in additional databases will be available soon. As does the original software, Internet Grateful Med includes the capability, called Loansome Doc, for requesting a hard copy of documents through the Interlibrary Loan process. However, unlike the original Grateful Med, it is not yet set up to download results in the tagged Medline format that some researchers use to import citations into bibliography programs such as Endnote or Reference Manager. Another key difference is that the original Grateful Med allows the user to save search strategies for later reuse, whereas Internet Grateful Med does not. As a Web-based application, Internet Grateful Med cannot read from the users' local computer disk. Small applications, or "applets," written in the Java programming language may provide a solution to this dilemma in the future. |
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How It WorksInternet Grateful Med has two major sets of assisted Medline search functions: "just do it" and "user invoked." "Just do it" functions are performed automatically in the background. "User invoked" functions involve situations in which the user is asked to clarify his or her search or to choose among suggested options. One of the "user invoked" functions offers the opportunity to restrict retrieval to articles in which a given term is a central concept of the article, and it offers guidance in adding subheading qualifiers to help focus a search. |
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Although the graphical nature of most Web browsers makes Internet Grateful Med a snap for researchers to use [see "Getting Started"], another feature of the World Wide Web posed major headaches for Internet Grateful Med's developers at NLM. The standard Web interaction - in which a user sends a request to a remote computer server, gets back a response, and the connection is broken - leaves the computer server with no history of the user's prior requests. NLM's solution for the "stateless" nature of normal Web interactions was to develop an Expert State Engine at the heart of the Internet Grateful Med gateway. This program has two parts: a "listener" that talks to a user's computer and an "expert state maintainer" that remembers what users have done and has rules for mapping terms and creating and refining searches. For more information on this latest member of the Grateful Med family of programs or other aspects of accessing online databases via the Web, contact NLM's Internet Grateful Med development team (e-mail: access@nlm.nih.gov). |
The Numbers Say It AllMore than 125,000 individuals and institutions currently have accounts for searching the National Library of Medicine's 40 online databases. These users made more than 7.5 million searches in 1995. Users of the original Grateful Med do 90% of their searching in Medline, which contains more than 8 million citations. More than 30,000 new citations are being added each month. Metathesaurus MuscleThe National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®) Metathesaurus® Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus is an electronic Rosetta stone containing 589,000 names for 253,000 concepts in 30 biomedical vocabularies, thesauri, or classifications. Users of Internet Grateful Med draw upon this deep and carefully organized reservoir of medical terms when they employ the "find related" function, which compares the user's search terms with all terms in the Metathesaurus to produce a ranked concept "hit list," concept definitions, and Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) notes. Many of the concepts will be underlined, indicating that they are hyper links that the user can click on to ask Internet Grateful Med to create a graphic tree display of related MeSH terms. In another striking feature made possible by the Metathesaurus, Internet Grateful Med offers direct access to millions of pairs of co-terms, which are concepts that appear as "major topic" index terms for the same citation in Medline. With the single click of a mouse, users can include a concept and co-term - or even a triad of a concept, qualifier, and co-term - to improve their searches. |