Reengineering of MeSH thesauri for term selection to optimize literature retrieval and knowledge reconstruction in support of stem cell research

Table 1 Thesauri specifically referring to stem cells (TSRSC) construction and retrieval test

Retrieval test	Strategies	Recall ratio^a	Precision ratio^b
1	Only focus on MeSH term search related to Stem Cells	87.84 %	89 %
2	Refine search terms:exclusion of HL-60 Cells, U937 Cells, K562 Cells	87.53 %	95 %
3	Refine search terms: including term search rather than MeSH only	96.39 %	90 %
4	Final set of search terms: exclusion of “Precursor B-Cell Lymphoblastic Leukemia-Lymphoma” OR “Precursor T-Cell Lymphoblastic Leukemia-Lymphoma” OR “Precursor Cell Lymphoblastic Leukemia-Lymphoma”;	97.70 %	94.40 %
4	Addition of “stemness” OR “stem cell” OR “ipsc” OR “ips cell” OR “progenitor cell”	97.70 %	94.40 %

^aRecall ratio: Investigate how many articles in the sample set are retrieved using TSRSC (the sample set contains 5527 articles)
^bPrecision ratio: Randomly select 100 literatures retrieved by TSRSC, examine whether the literature is in the field of stem cells. Process repeated three times

ISSN: 1472-6947