Useful Articles:

Elmer Bernstam, M.D., assistant professor, School of Health Information Sciences (SHIS),
and internal medicine, Medical School

Search techniques that have been successful on the World Wide Web are helping practicing physicians and biomedical researchers find the answers to their questions.

Elmer Bernstam, M.D.

“As a general internist, my clinical practice is very broad,” Bernstam said. “Therefore, I must constantly read about a variety of fields. I face the same difficulties as other people when I try to find information to answer my clinical questions or to help in my research.”

Bernstam is working on better ways to access the biomedical literature through MEDLINE, the largest and most complete database of biomedical articles. MEDLINE, which currently contains more than 15 million articles dating back to the 1950s, is growing by more than 500,000 articles per year.

“As more and more articles are published, finding answers to common questions becomes harder because queries return too many articles,” he said. “Therefore, we are developing ways to automatically identify important articles. Specifically, we are using techniques that have been successful on the World Wide Web to help searchers find useful articles.”