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Daniel P. Dabney, JD, MLIS
Tarlton Law Library University of Texas Austin

JAMA. 1986;255(16):2158-2159.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The article on full-text medical literature retrieval by Collen and Flagle¹ introduced readers to an important source of medical information, but one question left unanswered in that piece is potentially more important than the ones addressed. Lawyers have been working with full-text document retrieval for many years now, and the experience of the legal profession with such systems may be instructive.

The most important question about information retrieval systems is whether they find the things they are supposed to find. Collen and Flagle note that the very small pilot data base they used was not big enough to evaluate the retrieval performance of the MEDIS system. The leading study of the retrieval effectiveness of full-text systems was conducted by Blair and Maron² and was cited but not discussed by Collen and Flagel. Blair and Maron found that a full-text system they studied retrieved no more . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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