An occasional feature to bring readers up to date with developments in PJOnline, the website version of The Pharmaceutical Journal, and to answer common questions about the service. PJOnline is available on the internet at www.pharmj.com
The archive of articles available in the PJOnline database is growing rapidly, and now stands at more than 1,000. Although this means that the archive is becoming more and more useful, it also means that finding specific articles of interest may become more difficult. One of the most frequent criticisms of the world wide web is that it leads to "information overload". PJOnline has many features that can help web users to find a vital piece of information as quickly as possible.
Some tips on getting the best out of the PJOnline archive search are outlined below. These tips are also available through the site itself by clicking on "Help with searching". Anyone experiencing problems with the PJOnline website should contact the website controller, at editor@pharmj.org.uk.
Relevance ranking Following an archive search, the title and bibliographic reference of each retrieved article is listed. Although the list may be large, it is ranked by relevance to the search, with the most relevant articles appearing at the top of the list. The relevance percentage is displayed in red next to the title. Those items matching all the search terms will be displayed as 100 per cent relevant, and so on.
Highlighting of search terms When a user clicks on the title of the article, the full text is displayed. The words used in the search are highlighted to enable users to ascertain quickly whether the article is of use to them. If the document is long, the page will automatically scroll down to display the first highlighted term of the document.
Checkboxes for different types of article PJOnline articles are generally classified by the section of The Journal in which they appeared. The categories are: Comment (including leading articles, Broad Spectrum and "Onlooker"), News, Clinical, Business, The Society, Letters, Continuing Education, Articles, Original Papers, Forum, Reviews, Products and Notice-Board. By selecting one or more of the checkboxes associated with these categories, web users can limit their search to certain sections of the printed Journal. For example, a search for Smithkline Beecham will produce a long list of references, but a user who is only interested in business or news items about the company can select those two boxes to exclude articles mentioning Smithkline Beecham in any other section of The Journal.
Different search strategies The search engine used by PJOnline is flexible enough to allow the use of a variety of search strategies to help retrieve the articles of most interest.
Natural language searching - The easiest way to search the archive is to enter any word or phrase - or even a complete sentence - into the main search box. The search engine will look for these words and concepts, and will return a list of relevant items. One should always enter as many relevant words into the box as possible. Although additional words will return a longer list, the most relevant will always appear at the top.
Truncation - The search engine uses the stem of the word to search. Therefore plurals of words are automatically retrieved. For example, a search for "pharmacy" will also retrieve articles containing the word "pharmacies".
Phrase searching - Although the user can enter a phrase into the search box, each word within that phrase is treated separately by the search engine, ie, the individual words may appear anywhere in the article. However, if the phrase is enclosed in double quotation marks, those articles containing the exact phrase will appear at the top of the list, while those containing only the individual words will be treated as less relevant.
Search weighting - A higher weighting can be given to words that are more important to the search. To do this, the user simply adds a plus (+) sign in front of the word, (eg, +hypertension). Similarly, less desired terms can be preceded by a minus (–) sign.
The PJOnline website is developing rapidly in response to the needs of users. One of the main features introduced since the launch of PJOnline in September is the "Search more like this" option. This feature allows users to improve their original search at the click of a button. Documents of interest are selected from the initial search by clicking the checkbox; clicking the "more like this" button, will automatically retrieve articles similar to those selected.
Further new features will be added as the site continues to develop.