Search Term Highlighting

Users should be able to see occurrences of their search terms (the terms they entered in the search box) within the articles that are retrieved. Search term highlighting changes the background color and/or the font of the user’s search terms within the article title and body of articles resulting from a search. This fixes problems with the current system highlighting which misses many occurrences that should be highlighted.

Spelling Correction

The system will attempt to suggest a proper spelling for all misspelled search terms. For example, a search composed of the word “tylenox” will result in the system prompting the user with “Did you mean tylenol?”

Improved Relevancy

The system will now return articles from a search in order of relevancy. Relevancy is a measure of the number of times the search terms occur in the article title and body. Articles with more occurrences of the user’s search terms are deemed more relevant than articles with few occurrences. A second option for ranking articles is now provided, “Relevancy with Aging”, that combines both the above measure of relevancy with the “age” of the article. This results in a ranking that brings more recent and more relevant articles to the front (top) of the list.

Synonym Query Expansion

Search terms can now be automatically “expanded” to include system defined synonyms, thereby retrieving articles that mention the original search terms, their synonyms or both the original terms and the synonyms. For example, a search for “Tylenol” will now produce a search for “Tylenol OR acetaminophen”, because acetaminophen is the generic name of the trade name of Tylenol. This provides the user with all the articles that discuss the Tylenol concept regardless of whether each article uses the generic or trade name. Synonyms are provided for most if not all marketed drugs, company names, protein names, etc., defined in Elsevier’s Emtree database, the FDA’s Orange Book, and acronyms defined within FDC articles.

Toggle Synonym Expansion On/Off

The user can decide to turn synonym expansion on or off depending on their preference for any given search.

Clarify Ambiguous Acronyms

Some acronyms are “ambiguous”, that is, they have multiple meanings. For example, the acronym “NDA” might mean “non-disclosure agreement” in one article and “new drug application” in another. When the user enters “NDA” as a search term, the system does not know which meaning of NDA the user wants and consequently will return articles that include both meanings. In an effort to help the user select just the meaning(s) that he/she is after, the system will now present the user with a selection box listing the various meanings so that ambiguous term can be “disambiguated”. So if the user selects “new drug application” as the preferred meaning of NDA, then only articles mentioning “new drug application” will be retrieved.

Synonym Highlighting

This feature extends the highlighting feature previously mentioned to also highlight the synonyms of search terms when synonym expansion is turned on. Therefore, in our example of Tylenol which is expanded to include acetaminophen, the system will now also highlight occurrences of “acetaminophen” in the retrieved articles. To differentiate between the occurrences of the original search terms and synonyms within the articles, the background color of the highlighting is different for original terms and synonyms, e.g., the original terms are highlighted with a yellow background while synonyms are highlighted with a light blue background.