The STAT!‐Ref Medical CDROM Collection runs on both Windows and Macintosh systems. Minimum recommended hardware include: Windows System: 386 or higher processor, 4 MB RAM (8 recommended), 6 MB available hard disk space, Windows 3.1 or higher, VGA or better monitor (SVGA recommended).
Macintosh System: 68020 or better (PowerPC native), 4 MB RAM (8 recommended), 4 MB available hard disk space, System 7.0 or higher, 16 color or better monitor (256 color recommended).
The installation program uses standard methods for both platforms. I installed the software on a Windows 95 machine with no difficulty. I was offered the opportunity to choose the installation drive and directory. I selected a drive and directory other than the recommended and the installation proceeded properly. The program also offers the choice of standalone or network configurations. The program also includes an uninstall option.
The current CD contains 27 drug and medical reference titles. There are nine drug‐related books, including Physicians GenRX, AMA Drug Evaluation/s, and Handbook of Adverse Drug Reactions. Incorporated in the 18 medical reference sources are Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment, Williams Obstetrics, Rudolph’s Geriatrics, and Stein Internal Medicine. The manual indicates that more titles may be added in future releases. Each title is locked on the CD by a key code which is provided when a title is purchased.
Search engine:
This program uses the Teton Viewer software. The opening screen allows you to choose which volumes you wish to search and a search term entry box. You may choose all of the titles or any combination. With the number of titles available, I found selecting all titles provided a large number of results even for very specific searches.
At the bottom of the screen is a slider marked Precision with a scale from low to high. This scale has five options which relate to Boolean and proximity searching as follows: low equals OR’, level 2 equals AND’, 3 equals within 10 words’, 4 equals within 5 words’, and 5 equals terms must be adjacent’. The numbers in categories 3 and 4 (within 10 or 5 words) can be changed. As an experienced searcher, I found this a little awkward at first. I would either type in the operator as I am used to doing or forget to move the slider appropriately. However, I did find this metaphor to work quite well once I was retrained in entering my search statements.
The top of the search screen contains a number of buttons to assist the searcher. These allow for selecting all titles, selecting none of the titles, showing the Table Of Contents, listing a history of recent search statements, including suffixes in a search, using synonyms, viewing titles by name or cover picture, and a context‐sensitive help button. Two other buttons allow the searcher to add and save Search Sets for later use and the option to show locked as well as purchased titles in the search results list. The buttons available at the top of the screen vary depending on where you are in the program.
The search engine is very fast. Once the results are listed, the user can double click on an item to see the text. There are other options for moving around the program if you do not have, or prefer not to use, a mouse. Searches can be filtered to only search in certain sections of a text. The results are presented in the Smart Match window which ranks the items found. The ranking system is involved and cannot be covered here due to space limitations. Highly relevant documents did seem to appear at the top of the list, however. The searcher can also view a Smart Match Summary to see just how many hits were found in each title searched.
One feature I like is the ability to display a table of contents for the item retrieved. This made navigating to a particular section of a document extremely easy. For example, I searched on a particular drug, brought up the table of contents for the article, and quickly moved to the section on brand names.
Documentation:
The 58 page manual is well written and does a good job of explaining the features of the program. There are three appendices which include the license agreement, a list of stop words, and keyboard shortcuts for both Mac and Windows systems. The only shortcoming is the lack of an index.
Evaluation:
I must admit I was skeptical at first. This was another full text search engine. I hadn’t been pleased with any I had used … up until now. This program does an excellent job of handling full text. The user does have to make intelligent decisions in choosing titles to search. Selecting all titles will provide extremely large hit lists. However, when I chose titles appropriate to my search, the results retrieved were highly relevant. The ranking algorithm appears to work quite well. The slider bar metaphor should be extremely helpful for the novice user. The explanations for each level are given in nontechnical terms.
The manual claims the program supports natural language searching. It does this, I believe, by performing a Boolean OR search on all the words in the given statement minus stop words. I tried the example in the manual. As one might expect, the resulting list was rather large even when I limited the search to only those texts which were appropriate to the request. I found the answer much faster, with fewer items to review, by doing a normal search.
Overall, I like this product. The search software has many more features than I was able to cover in this review which add to its flexibility and power. I highly recommend this product.
