@Article{info:doi/10.2196/jmir.6.3.e27,
author="Plovnick, Robert M
and Zeng, Qing T",
title="Reformulation of Consumer Health Queries with Professional Terminology: A Pilot Study",
journal="J Med Internet Res",
year="2004",
month="Sep",
day="3",
volume="6",
number="3",
pages="e27",
keywords="Information retrieval; consumer informatics; Internet",
abstract="Background:  The Internet is becoming an increasingly important resource for health-information seekers. However, consumers often do not use effective search strategies. Query reformulation is one potential intervention to improve the effectiveness of consumer searches. Objective: We endeavored to answer the research question: ``Does reformulating original consumer queries with preferred terminology from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus lead to better search returns?'' Methods:  Consumer-generated queries with known goals (n=16) that could be mapped to UMLS Metathesaurus terminology were used as test samples. Reformulated queries were generated by replacing user terms with Metathesaurus-preferred synonyms (n=18). Searches (n=36) were performed using both a consumer information site and a general search engine. Top 30 precision was used as a performance indicator to compare the performance of the original and reformulated queries. Results:  Forty-two percent of the searches utilizing reformulated queries yielded better search returns than their associated original queries, 19{\%} yielded worse results, and the results for the remaining 39{\%} did not change. We identified ambiguous lay terms, expansion of acronyms, and arcane professional terms as causes for changes in performance. Conclusions:  We noted a trend towards increased precision when providing substitutions for lay terms, abbreviations, and acronyms. We have found qualitative evidence that reformulating queries with professional terminology may be a promising strategy to improve consumer health-information searches, although we caution that automated reformulation could in fact worsen search performance when the terminology is ill-fitted or arcane. ",
issn="1438-8871",
doi="10.2196/jmir.6.3.e27",
url="http://www.jmir.org/2004/3/e27/",
url="https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.6.3.e27",
url="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15471753"
}