Objective: To determine whether information retrieval might be enhanced by making each component of a structured abstract a separately searchable field.
Design: Parallel searches on records arranged so that each abstract could either be searched in its entirety or as a collection of structured fields.
Subjects: Records about cardiovascular disease downloaded from MEDLINE and tested against clinical questions derived from a concurrent survey of CDβROM use in three health science libraries.
Intervention: The investigators identified terms used to structure abstracts on MEDLINE and imported the abstracts into an Idealist database prior to searching using keywords from clinical questions.
Measurements and main results: recall and precision rates are given for each question in the βstructuredβ and the βunstructuredβ set of records.
Conclusions: Use of structured, rather than unstructured, abstracts improves precision at the expense of recall and places heavier demands upon the searcher's skill in choosing the correct fields within the abstract to search. Further investigation requires more accurate simulation of MEDLINE software that utilizes features such as MeSH terms, explode, facilities and delimiters.