Information storage and retrieval from MedLine databases

Professional update is a necessity for today's professionals, especially in the area of the medicine. The health professional have to offer to their patients the newest and safest treatment. To achieve that goal they must know the rules of the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), which depends on making rational decisions in quality, based scientific knowledge. MEDLINE (R) is the main bibliographical database of scientific information in health and a basic referent for retrieving medical information in Internet, but to perform a search is necessary to use a very specific terminology, an artificial language, which, in some cases if not known by the professional can impede the recovery of information. Therefore with this paper, the authors try to improve the use of the MEDLINE databases for the efficient search and retrieval of scientific documents. This work emerges due to prior findings in the University of Los Andes, where only a small fraction of professors in health sciences schools know and use effectively the health databases We considered that a correct use of MEDLINE (R) will give considerable benefits to these professionals, as much in its professional update, like in the information retrieval in research as in the application of the strategies in the daily clinical EBM.