Information Retrieval

Despite the vast wealth of biomedical textual information—be it on the web, in the scientific literature, or clinical records—we expect to be able to find content relevant to our needs in a nearly instantaneous manner. Quickly sifting through the haystack to find the needle matching our information needs—commonly known as search—is the task of Information Retrieval (IR). This chapter discusses the fundamentals of IR, common biomedical applications of IR, and many of the resources available for building biomedical IR systems.