Discovering the preferences of physicians with regards to rank-ordered medical documents

Dympna O'Sullivan*, Szymon Wilk, Wojtek Michalowski, Roman Słowiński, Roland Thomas, Ken Farion

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

The practice of evidence-based medicine involves consulting documents from repositories such as Scopus, PubMed, or the Cochrane Library. The most common approach for presenting retrieved documents is in the form of a list, with the assumption that the higher a document is on a list, the more relevant it is. Despite this list-based presentation, it is seldom studied how physicians perceive the importance of the order of documents presented in a list. This paper describes an empirical study that elicited and modeled physicians' preferences with regard to list-based results. Preferences were analyzed using a GRIP method that relies on pairwise comparisons of selected subsets of possible rank-ordered lists composed of 3 documents. The results allow us to draw conclusions regarding physicians' attitudes towards the importance of having documents ranked correctly on a result list, versus the importance of retrieving relevant but misplaced documents. Our findings should help developers of clinical information retrieval applications when deciding how retrieved documents should be presented and how performance of the application should be assessed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in computational intelligence
Subtitle of host publication14th international conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in knowledge-based systems, IPMU 2012, Catania, Italy, July 9-13, 2012, proceedings, Part III
EditorsSalvatore Greco, Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier, Giulianella Coletti, et al
Place of PublicationBerlin (DE)
PublisherSpringer
Pages142-150
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-642-31718-7
ISBN (Print)978-3-642-31717-0
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Event14th international conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in knowledge-based systems - Catania, Italy
Duration: 9 Jul 201213 Jul 2012

Publication series

NameCommunications in computer and information science
PublisherSpringer
Volume299
ISSN (Print)1865-0929

Conference

Conference14th international conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in knowledge-based systems
Abbreviated titleIPMU 2012
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityCatania
Period9/07/1213/07/12

Keywords

  • Document Retrieval
  • Evidence-Based Medicine
  • Information Retrieval
  • Physician preferences
  • Rank-ordered Lists

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