How do you choose your literature search tool(s)?

Abstract

With increasing number of bio-literature search engines, scientists and health professionals either make a subjective choice of tool(s) or face a challenge of analyzing multiple features of a plethora of bibliographic software. There is an urgent need for a thorough comparative analysis of the available literature scanning tools, from the user’s perspective. We report results of the first time semi-quantitative comparison of 21 search programs, which can search published (partial or full text) documents in life science areas. The observations can assist life science researchers and medical professionals to make an informed selection among the programs, depending on their search objectives. Some of the important findings are: 1. Most of the hits obtained from Scopus, ReleMed, EBImed, CiteXplore, and HighWire Press were usually relevant (i.e., these tools showed a better precision than other tools). 2. But a very high number of relevant citations were retrieved by HighWire Press, Google Scholar, CiteXplore and Pubmed Central (they had better recall). 3. HWP and CiteXplore seemed to have a good balance of precision and recall efficiencies. 4. PubMed Central, PubMed and Scopus provided the most useful query systems. 5. GoPubMed, BioAsk, EBIMed, ClusterMed could be more useful among the tools that can automatically process the retrieved citations for further scanning of bio-entities such as proteins, diseases, tissues, molecular interactions etc). The authors suggest the use of PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar and HighWire Press - for better coverage, and GoPubMed - to view the hits categorized based on the MeSH and gene ontology terms.