Assessing the Impact of English Language Skills and Education Level on PubMed Searches by Dutch-speaking Users

Klaar Vanopstal, Robert Vander Stichele, Godelieve Laureys, Joost Buysschaert

Abstract
The aim of this study was to assess the retrieval effectiveness of nursing students in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. We tested two groups: students from the master of Nursing and Midwifery training, and students from the bachelor of Nursing program. The test consisted of five parts: first, the students completed an enquiry about their computer skills, experiences with PubMed and how they assessed their own language skills. Secondly, an introduction into the use of MeSH in PubMed was given, followed by a PubMed search. After the literature search, a second enquiry was completed in which the students were asked to give their opinion about the test. To conclude, an official language test was completed. The results of the PubMed search, i.e. a list of articles the students deemed relevant for a particular question, were compared to a gold standard. Precision, recall and F-score were calculated in order to evaluate the efficiency of the PubMed search. We used information from the search process, such as search term formulation and MeSH term selection to evaluate the search process and examined their relationship with the results of the language test and the level of education.
Anthology ID:
L10-1267
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/389_Paper.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Klaar Vanopstal, Robert Vander Stichele, Godelieve Laureys, and Joost Buysschaert. 2010. Assessing the Impact of English Language Skills and Education Level on PubMed Searches by Dutch-speaking Users. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Assessing the Impact of English Language Skills and Education Level on PubMed Searches by Dutch-speaking Users (Vanopstal et al., LREC 2010)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/389_Paper.pdf
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