About the AccessMedicine Search Engine

The search engine is a state-of-the-art tool designed for sophisticated collections of medical information. It runs in conjunction with a layer of semantic metadata that has been applied to all of the information in the website so that the content, though written by multiple authors and derived from many resources, is completely integrated and connected by these topic-based medical language tags that are compliant with the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

When a user searches for information on AccessMedicine, the search engine looks for matches with the metadata so that it is not relying on matching exact words when they appear in the content but on the true meaning of the concepts detailed in the content. Therefore, users can find all the relevant discussions of the topic they are looking for, even if named differently in different resources.

In the infrequent cases in which a user cannot find the results he or she is looking for using the semantic search engine, he or she can use Advanced Search to perform a full-text search that allows the Boolean connectors "and" and "or" and that searches through each word in the data set.

About Autosuggest

Click on "enable autosuggest" for a list of possible search queries to appear as you type in the search box. Search suggestions come from the AccessMedicine lexicon, which includes thousands of symptoms, disorders, and drug names.