A tutorial on information retrieval: Basic terms and concepts

Abstract

This informal tutorial is intended for investigators and students who would like to understand the workings of information retrieval systems, including the most frequently used search engines: PubMed and Google. Having a basic knowledge of the terms and concepts of information retrieval should improve the efficiency and productivity of searches. As well, this knowledge is needed in order to follow current research efforts in biomedical information retrieval and text mining that are developing new systems not only for finding documents on a given topic, but extracting and integrating knowledge across documents. © 2006 Zhou et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.