Basics of Quertle

1. Quertle

2. What is Quertle? More than simple keyword searching, Quertle has created a database of 250 million “relationships” that retrieves citations relevant to the query. Quertle uses MEDLINE/PubMed as provided by the National Library of Medicine and full-text documents from BioMed Central and PubMed Central.

3. Brief overview Quertle is based on relationships between words/concepts Known as “Relationship Triplets” which is subject-verb-object Uses biomedical-specific natural language processing, which finds possible sentence structures then converts to a semantic tree

4. How to Make a Query Aspirin treats headaches What treats headaches? Aspirin treats what? Headache $Treatments Aspirin $Treatments Somewhat case sensitive AIDS vs aids (“AIDS” as a disease and “aids” as a verb) No Boolean logic No “AND” “OR” “NOT” No double quotes You can search… But you should know…

5. Other Features: Power Terms Power Terms = $ Query terms to represent a class of entities/objects. For example: $Diseases represents all diseases Cannot create your own Power Terms, the list located under the search bar Most common power terms:

6. Other Features: Filters Filters “Also Containing” Refining search terms “Published Within” “Publication Type” “Key Concepts” Terms Quertle automatically identifies as “key concepts” in the results set “General Concepts” are additional concepts that may be of interest

7. Comparison of Acupuncture and Depression: OVID Ovid has 357 citations for the term “acupuncture” When combined with depression, only 3 results

8. Comparison of Acupuncture and Depression: CINAHL A better database to search this topic, “acupuncture” has over 6,000 citations When combined with depression, 153 results

9. Comparison of Acupuncture and Depression: PubMed Using classic Boolean logic, “acupuncture and depression” has 417 results

10. Comparison of Acupuncture and Depression: Quertle Depends on the verb used for relationship results “For” = 76 “Cures” = 4 “Helps” = 0 “Affects” = 2 “Treats” = 4 Interestingly, the Keyword Results were always over 500, although the exact number changed slightly depending on the verb used

11. Applying Key Concepts Depending on the verb used, key concepts can help focus the search In this case, choosing “treatment” when searching “acupuncture for depression” highlights 25 citations that directly relates to the treatment of depression with acupuncture

12. Initial Thoughts Asking direct questions can be helpful when searching topics that aren’t complicated However, confining the search query to three words can be irritating if the right verb isn’t used The Key Concepts side bar can help focus the search, but again depends on what verb was used The Power Terms can be useful, but it’s topic dependent