An evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text document-retrieval system
Communications of the ACM
Expanding end-users' query statements for free text searching with a search-aid thesaurus
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Query expansion using lexical-semantic relations
SIGIR '94 Proceedings of the 17th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Terminological knowledge structure for intermediary expert systems
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue on history of information science
Automatic query expansion via lexical-semantic relationships
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Cognitive and task influences on Web searching behavior
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
The effects of topic familiarity on information search behavior
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
User studies informing E-table interfaces
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
The effects of domain knowledge on search tactic formulation
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Examining the effectiveness of real-time query expansion
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
A review of ontology based query expansion
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
What is user engagement? A conceptual framework for defining user engagement with technology
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Visualization of health-subject analysis based on query term co-occurrences
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Evaluation of query expansion using MeSH in PubMed
Information Retrieval
Exploring criteria for successful query expansion in the genomic domain
Information Retrieval
How to interpret PubMed queries and why it matters
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Journal of Information Science
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When consumers search for health information, a major obstacle is their unfamiliarity with the medical terminology. Even though medical thesauri such as the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and related tools (e.g., the MeSH Browser) were created to help consumers find medical term definitions, the lack of direct and explicit integration of these help tools into a health retrieval system prevented them from effectively achieving their objectives. To explore this issue, we conducted an empirical study with two systems: One is a simple interface system supporting query-based searching; the other is an augmented system with two new components supporting MeSH term searching and MeSH tree browsing. A total of 45 subjects were recruited to participate in the study. The results indicated that the augmented system is more effective than the simple system in terms of improving user-perceived topic familiarity and question-answer performance, even though we did not find users spend more time on the augmented system. The two new MeSH help components played a critical role in participants' health information retrieval and were found to allow them to develop new search strategies. The findings of the study enhanced our understanding of consumers' search behaviors and shed light on the design of future health information retrieval systems.