How do clinicians search for and access biomedical literature to answer clinical questions?

Abstract

This paper presents a retrospective data analysis on how 75 clinicians searched for and accessed biomedical literature from an online information retrieval system to answer six clinical scenarios. Using likelihood ratio measures to quantify the impact of documents on a decision, and a graphical representation to model clinicians' journeys of accessing documents, this analysis reveals that clinicians did not necessarily arrive at the same answer after having accessed the same document, and that documents did not influence clinicians in the same manner. A possible explanation for these phenomena is that people experience cognitive biases during information searching which influence their decision outcome. This analysis raises the hypotheses that people experience the anchoring effect, order effects, exposure effect and reinforcement effect while searching for information and that these biases may subsequently influence the way decisions are made.