Hippocrates: A Context-Aware, Collaboration Enabling Search Tool

As the volume of medical literature is growing rapidly, search engines implementing the basic information retrieval model often fail to address the information needs of the medical professionals. In this paper we propose a search tool that aims to capture the information need of the clinical user by including concepts from the context in the searching process. Three different approaches were implemented and evaluated, the pre-filtering, the query expansion and the reranking. The system also supports Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) through algorithmic and User Interface (UI) interventions. The returned citations on a given query are reranked based on the ratings that team members have assigned for similar cases making use of the scoring proposed by the ISpy system. The results from the evaluation of the proposed tool show that pre-filtering performed better than the alternative contextualization search approaches in terms of precision.