Relemed is a health sciences search engine and one I have not heretofore examined closely.

It is nowhere near as good as GoPubMed (lacking the latter’s greater user-friendliness overall) and as it basically searches only Medline (although allowing quick linkouts to publisher sites, such that of Elsevier, and to PubMed proper) it lacks Mednar’s power as a gateway to the often obscure but still useful resources lying virtually untapped in the recesses of the Deep Web. I don’t see much buzz over the last two years about Relemed or hearing medical librarians rave about it. The consensus seems to be that is an interesting experiment but not something that is much employed in the daily doings of power searchers in medicine.

So, why I am writing about it? Well, because any fairly new (although Relemed has, in fact, been around since 2007) health-related search engine bears looking at and being critiqued. Second, it is edifying to parse how the developers of such tools market them, the claims they make for them and the reactions to such tools in the standard literature and in the blogosphere. Third, it is interesting to see who is developing such tools. Fourth and finally, it is fascinating to see that the developers of Relemed have leveraged the power of open access publishing and the Creative Commons licensing system to discourse on their work to a greater audience via the Web than they could reach in for-profit periodicals with fairly tiny audiences such as Medical Reference Services Quarterly.

I tried out Relemed and found it serviceable but not much more than that. Its biggest flaw, it seems to me, is that it lacks PubMed’s capacity to limit and order results by date. That is a fatal weakness. Most medical librarians are on the lookout for the latest information and don’t have time to troll through items from, say, 1997. They want the ability to be learn about items older than 10 years, of course. But you can’t beat the ability to learn quickly what the current practices are for the last two or three years or so. It doesn’t matter how “relevant” a medical article is if it is dated in nature. Date of publication is a no-brainer as a search parameter and it is surprising that it is lacking in Relemed.

Also, the look and feel of Relemed is blah. It also seems to lack the email alert capacity of both PubMed and Mednar. But that may be because Relemed is designed for serving immediate patient needs and providing quick answers to basic clinical questions and not for ongoing research interests. Still, it seems pretty limited overall in terms of features in our slick Web 2.0 times.

I tried out my usual search term, “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” and got the standard mix that PubMed would have provided. But the “links” feature doesn’t really offer much. As noted, it doesn’t apprise you of any resources you might not have been familiar with, in sorry contrast to Mednar, ScienceRoll, and SearchMedica which all do. Relemed links included Google (not even Goggle Scholar), to the publisher’s site of the abstracted article (which is standard operating procedure in PubMed) and to the search engine Scirus, which is something the others don’t do but then why would they, as they tend to be better search tools themselves? Scirus is no great shakes.

Relemed does have neat features that some of its rivals do not. You can do the following:

[text size] use this font size for text: xx-small  x-small  small  medium  large  x-large xx-large

[highlight color] use this color to highlight query words in the articles: red  green  blue  black  purple  yellow  orange  navy  olive  maroon

That is particularly helpful for those with visual impairments.

But in terms of its marketing, Relemed needs major revamping. There is no simple, “About Us” page. There is a news page, but the most recent item is from May 2008 and I could not get back to the page that featured links to commentary, such as that of the noted blogger David Rothman: and got an error message for the Relemed feedback webpage. The page of links to commentary about Relemed (that page, which I now can’t find—which is indicative of the navigation problems with Relemed) had featured links to Relemed own press releases, which are not unbiased and should not properly be in such a section. That section of the site (again, which I can’t now can’t find–grrrr) also made inflated claims for Relemed saying it is in some ways superior to PubMed, which I for one don’t buy.

There, now what positive things will I say about Relemed? Well, first of all the Department of Public Health Sciences of the University of Virginia School of Medicine is to be commended for its initiative, daring and commitment of substantial resources to this project. Creating a medical search engine requires a substantial investment of resources and employment of know-how and every new search engine that enlarges the arsenal for researchers, working medical people and medical and other librarians is something to be grateful for and its developers should be lauded accordingly.

Additionally, the authors of the article about Relemed, “Relemed: Sentence-Level Search Engine With Relevance Score for the MEDLINE Database of Biomedical Articles,” deserve praise for explaining the impetus behind the development of Relemed so cogently and for contributing to the open access literature on this important topic. The more health-related search engines the better and the more discussion and scholarship about them the better.

Relemed isn’t perfect, but it deserves to be better known.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Health, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.