Characteristics of consumer terminology for health information retrieval

As millions of consumers perform health information retrieval online, the mismatch between their terminology and the terminologies of the information sources could become a major barrier to successful retrievals. To address this problem, we studied the characteristics of consumer terminology for hea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Methods of information in medicine Vol. 41; no. 4; p. 289
Main Authors:	Zeng, Q, Kogan, S, Ash, N, Greenes, R A, Boxwala, A A
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Germany 01.01.2002
Subjects:	Adult Consumer Behavior - statistics & numerical data Female Humans Information Storage and Retrieval - standards Internet Male Middle Aged Terminology as Topic Unified Medical Language System - statistics & numerical data
ISSN:	0026-1270
Online Access:	Get more information
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Summary:	As millions of consumers perform health information retrieval online, the mismatch between their terminology and the terminologies of the information sources could become a major barrier to successful retrievals. To address this problem, we studied the characteristics of consumer terminology for health information retrieval. Our study focused on consumer queries that were used on a consumer health service Web site and a consumer health information Web site. We analyzed data from the site-usage logs and conducted interviews with patients. Our findings show that consumers' information retrieval performance is very poor. There are significant mismatches at all levels (lexical, semantic and mental models) between the consumer terminology and both the information source terminology and standard medical vocabularies. Comprehensive terminology support on all levels is needed for consumer health information retrieval.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0026-1270
DOI:	10.1055/s-0038-1634490