Talk:MEDLINE

Early MEDLINE search interface -- still available anywhere?

Perhaps someone reading this knows if among all the "intelligent", "user friendly", MEDLINE-based tools, there is still either the interface from the mid-seventies, or even a further development. This allowed quite complex Boolean operations (i.e., multilevel parenthesized AND, OR and NOT). A variant, somewhat later, that ran in the library at Georgetown Medical School decreased the flexibility of the pure Boolean expressions but added the ability to create sets and do UNION and INTERSECTION. Ideally, I'd like the power at both the term and set level.

A feature I haven't seen in any tool for these databases is proximity searching: "retrieve all occurrences of MIGRAINE and *TRIPTAN if and only if they are in the same (sentence|paragraph)." This would be in addition to Boolean operators, so one could add "but NOT any article that cites ERGOTAMINE." Howard C. Berkowitz 12:40, 10 October 2008 (CDT)