BioNav: Effective Navigation on Query Results of Biomedical Databases

Abstract

Search queries on biomedical databases like PubMed often return a large number of results, only a small subset of which is relevant to the user. Ranking and categorization, which can also be combined, have been proposed to alleviate this information overload problem. Results categorization for biomedical databases is the focus of this work. A natural way to organize biomedical citations is according to their MeSH annotations, a comprehensive concept hierarchy used by PubMed. In this paper, we present the BioNav system, a novel search interface that enables the user to navigate large number of query results by organizing them using the MeSH concept hierarchy. First, the query results are organized into a navigation tree. Previous works expand the hierarchy in a predefined static manner. In contrast, BioNav uses an intuitive navigation cost model to decide what concepts to display at each step. Another difference from previous works is that the hierarchy is not strictly displayed level-by-level.