A Comparative Study of Biomedical Literature Databases by an Analysis of Descriptors

Abstract

As biomedical studies, recently, are becoming more interdisciplinary, and documents of that field are collected in various databases. In this study, we compared 4 biomedical field databases, MEDLINE, EMBASE, BIOSIS, and SCI, to make better use of databases not only for information retrieval but for content analysis. Descriptors frequently indexed to the documents recorded by these databases in common reflect the characteristics of each databases. Therefore, we examined these descriptors using frequency counting, term similarity analysis, and quantification theory III analysis. The results were given objectivity by applying the categories of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) also to descriptors of databases other than MEDLINE. These results revealed differences and character of 4 databases.