By Bev Butula, manager of library services, Davis & Kuelthau

Jan. 6, 2010 – Vertical search can be defined as employing portals, Web sites or engines that focus on a specific industry or topic. Conducting a vertical search often produces more relevant results than the same search in a general search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. This is because verticals eliminate nonessential information. PC Magazine states, “People want relevancy, and the more horizontal search they do, the more they tire of wading through pages of superfluous material. Although users can always narrow their search to hone in on their desired result, vertical search engines do the narrowing for them.”

Numerous quality vertical engines, portals, and Web sites exist that concentrate on medical and health research. This article will introduce some of those sites.

PubMed 

Journal articles are often the cornerstone of research. PubMed is a powerful search engine from the National Institute of Health to help locate scholarly articles. It contains over 19 million citations and abstracts from Medline and other life science journals.

PubMed permits the researcher to limit search results to only free full-text articles. This option exists because many of the items within the database provide only abstracts or bibliographic citations. Your local library can assist in securing copies when full text is unavailable.

PDRHealth

The general public has online access to information found in the Physician’s Desk Reference via this site. Basic drug and supplement information is clearly presented. Discussion includes the purpose of the drug, interactions, dosage information, and side effects. Entries often include an image of the drug.

Hakia Medical

Hakia is a semantic search engine that gathers online material from evaluated sources recommended by librarians. This vertical engine is a good launching point for research. It is a clean interface delivering results organized in four categories: web results, “credible sites,” images, and news. The site clearly identifies the various sources from which it obtains its information.

HEAL

The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is a collection of images and multimedia resources relevant to medical research. Researchers can conduct a general search using their specific terms or browse by subject. Subject heading include anatomy, diseases, chemical and drugs, analytical and diagnostic techniques and equipment, and several others.

Clinic Trials

The Web site states, “ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry of federally and privately supported clinical trials conducted in the United States and around the world. ClinicalTrials.gov gives you information about a trial's purpose, who may participate, locations, and phone numbers.” Users can narrow their search by taking advantage of the numerous fields available in the “advanced search.” Another option is to browse by study. Browsing categories include conditions, rare diseases, drug interventions, dietary supplements, sponsors, and locations.

NLM Gateway

The National Library of Medicine’s gateway is a comprehensive search engine. A search conducted from this site will produce a single list of results collected from multiple resources. Examples of these resources include TOXLINE (toxicology references), DIRLINE (directory of health organizations), MEDLINE (scholarly journals), and the Household Products Database (information on potential health effects of various household products).

Executing a user specific query creates an easy to read results summary. This summary is divided into categories to assist in identifying the most relevant material. Categories include bibliographic resources which focus on scholarly materials, consumer resources, and informational resources.

Hospital Compare

This Web site from the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services collects data on various hospitals. The researcher can review information and survey results for a particular hospital or compare several hospitals. Data is presented on various topics including the hospital’s process of care, outcome of care, readmission data, and survey of patient experiences.

YottaLook

YottaLook is vertical search engine with a radiology focus. It is maintained by four radiologists and produces results from peer reviewed materials. From the main search box, the user can choose to search images (currently more than 700,000), journals, books and anatomy. The Web site explains the various technologies implemented to ensure relevancy.

Healia

The Healia search engine, per its Web site, was originally developed with funding from the National Institute of Health and the National Cancer Institute. It is also certified by the Health on the Net Foundation.

The site searches medical journals, clinical trials, and various health guides. Each health guide is written by a medical expert and provides symptoms, causes, treatments, medications, and links to credible online resources.

Too often researchers start their online experience in a general search engine such as Google or Yahoo. This will result in hundreds of hits, many not relevant. Weeding through these irrelevant sites is not an efficient use of time. As an alternative, consider beginning medical and health research using a vertical search engine or portal.

Bev Butula is the manager of library of services at Davis & Kuelthau, Milwaukee. She is a past president of the Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin. Bev has written articles and spoken to numerous groups on issues such as effective Internet research, evaluation of Web sites and legal research. Prior to obtaining her Master's Degree in Library Science from UWM, Bev was a litigation paralegal.

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