Information Retrieval in Biomedical Research

Information retrieval is important in various biomedical research fields. This article covers the theoretical background and the state-of-the-art and future trends in biomedical information retrieval. Techniques for literature searches, genomic information retrieval, and database searches are discussed. Literature searches techniques cover name entity extraction, document indexing, document clustering, and event extraction. Genomic information retrieval techniques are based on sequence alignment algorithms. This article also briefly describes widely used biological databases and discusses the issues related to the information retrieval from these databases. Terminology systems are involved in almost every aspect of information retrieval. The various types of terminology systems and their usage to support information retrieval are reviewed. Keywords: homology; database; indexing; clustering; ontologies