The Efficiency of Pubmed Query Refinement Suggestions in Comparison with MESH Terms: A Bushehr Medical Specialists Viewpoint

Pubmed is among the most renowned medical databases. It uses MESH as a controlled vocabulary tool for facilitating the search process. Recently it has applied a second suggesting system (keywords and phrases) in this regard. Since information systems aim at retrieving the most relevant results، analyzing the efficiency of this new suggestion system and the old MESH terms from users'' point of view would be of importance in this regard.

As an applied study، this survey has been conducted through distributing a questionnaire during search sessions of users. To this end، a sample of 40 specialists، in the field of medical sciences، was selected through a purposive sampling method and the results were analyzed using SPSS 16. 0.

the results show that there is no significant difference between documents relevance when Pubmed suggestions or MESH terms are used during each search session. According to the findings of this study both Pubmed suggestions and MESH terms help the user with better understanding the concept and they both broaden the terminology of users. At the same time both methods are efficient in relevancy of the retrieved documents.