Information retrieval: a health and biomedical perspective

Information retrieval: a health and biomedical perspective Second edition, W. R. Hersh . New York . Springer-Verlag , 2003 . ISBN 0387955224 . 517 pp. 77 illustrations. £77.00. The updated edition of William Hersh's Information Retrieval provides a detailed, yet interesting account of the vast changes and advancements in the indexing and retrieval of knowledge-based health information made possible by the Internet. Since the first edition of this book, written between 1994 and 1995, the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet has affected information retrieval (IR) extensively. The first edition mentioned the WWW merely in the last chapter, in the ‘Special Topics’ section, when only a small minority of healthcare practitioners used a search engine for IR. In the updated version, however, the WWW is mentioned widely throughout and discusses the vast changes that have occurred in the field since 1995. Now, all health-care staff and even patients can search for health information. This book is, therefore, useful for people of all disciplines within healthcare and will appeal to those who are both experienced and inexperienced in IR. It will be particularly beneficial to health librarians who practice IR on a daily basis and are eager to enhance their current knowledge in this particular field. Hersh discusses the theory, practical applications, evaluation and research directions of all aspects of medical information retrieval systems which are divided into three sections: Basic Concepts, State of the Art and Research Directions. The book begins by providing the reader with a definition of IR with regards to the health and biomedical domain and then goes on to discuss models of systems and IR resources. This is a valuable section, particularly for those with little IR knowledge, and provides the reader with a basic understanding of the application of IR in health and biomedicine. It also enables the reader to become familiar with the basic definitions and models that are prevalent throughout the book. The next chapter gives a comprehensive description of current IR applications in health and biomedicine with a large amount of information on web-based systems and interfaces. Great attention to detail is provided when discussing bibliographic databases, medline and other National Library of Medicine databases, full text electronic publications and their access through the Web. Hersh also discusses, in some depth, controlled vocabularies and the types of searching that are possible. As a health librarian, this middle section is perhaps the most useful and interesting, providing the reader with a greater understanding of health databases. From a health librarian's point of view, the final section perhaps goes into too much detail covering the main areas of research and development in building better IR systems. It has two large chapters on lexical-statistical and linguistic systems, which are very technical and incorporate a number of complex mathematical equations to support the text. The end part of this section, however, is interesting as it introduces cross-language retrieval and question answering, with examples, to emphasize these approaches. It also gives a detailed account on research aimed at improving content, indexing, retrieval, devices and digital libraries. Overall, this is a very useful book for health librarians wanting to extend their knowledge of IR and indexing. Hersh uses examples, diagrams, tables and images captured from web pages to allow the reader to gain a greater understanding. This is particularly useful as, at times, parts of the book become quite complex and detailed. By referring to websites and providing web addresses when discussing a topic, Hersh invites the reader to explore the websites for himself rather than just read the book. A useful aspect of the book, which makes it ideal reference material, is that it need not be read in its entirety, but individual chapters can be accessed as appropriate. The book is a valuable resource for health librarians as a great deal of the areas that Hersh discusses either introduces or further enhances the readers’ current knowledge of IR that can then be put into practice when retrieving documents from textual databases. Perhaps one of the main drawbacks of the book is the price.