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. 2005 Jul;93(3):397–400.

Site-ation pearl growing: methods and librarianship history and theory

Sheryl L Ramer 1,*
PMCID: PMC1175807  PMID: 16059431

INTRODUCTION

Citation pearl growing is the process of using the characteristics of a relevant and authoritative article, called a pearl, to search for other relevant and authoritative materials [1]. Site-ation pearl growing is the parallel process of using the characteristics of a relevant and authoritative Website to search for other relevant and authoritative Websites [2]. This paper offers proof that the Internet is a practical and helpful tool for health sciences librarians, describes and gives examples of several methods of site-ation pearl growing, and shows how many of these methods are rooted in librarianship history and theory.

THE INTERNET'S RELEVANCE

Evidence is available that the Web is an important and accessible source of relevant and authoritative information. First, a proceeding published on the Cochrane Collaboration's Website recommends that systematic reviews “routinely” include an Internet search [3]. Second, government and nonprofit organizations—such as the National Library of Medicine [4], American Heart Association [5], and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) [6]—have Websites with full-text documents. Moreover, information on the Web is accessible because an ever-growing amount of reliable and authoritative information is included in the results of general search engines such as Google and Yahoo [7]. The following illustrates results from a search of Google without site-ation pearl growing.†

  • A search for “Limited English Proficiency” Diabetes‡ yields a report from Health Care Task Force in Congress, which discusses the “Cultural Competency/Limited English Proficiency Standards” and plans for educating Hispanics about diabetes, published in 2002 [8]. The results also include a report from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services regarding the effect of low health literacy and limited English proficiency, complete with references to studies done with diabetic subjects [9].

  • A search for Diabetes “Practice Guidelines” yields full-text American Diabetes Association position statements related to clinical practice from 2004 [10] and Canadian Diabetes Association practice guidelines from 2003 [11].

  • A search for “Thyroidectomy National Statistics” yields statistics for thyroidectomies collected by AHRQ from 1993 [12] and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1996 [13].

METHODS OF SITE-ATION PEARL GROWING

Although general search engines can sometimes provide satisfactory results, site-ation pearl growing helps in searching the Web, because no search engine crawls all Websites [14] and search engines only bring some order to the “wildly disorganized” Internet [15]. Users who find a limited number of authoritative and relevant sites can use the process to find similar sites. Several methods of site-ation pearl growing exist.

Deleting portions of the uniform resource locator (URL)

Sometimes searches on search engines reveal only a portion of the pages available on a Website. Therefore, a pearl's home page might have information not apparent in the original search. For example, the above search for thyroidectomy (“Thyroidectomy National Statistics”) resulted in AHRQ's statistics from 1993 [12]. Deleting the text after the last backslash, changing the Website from www.ahrq.gov/data/hcup/93pcchp.htm to http://www.ahrq.gov/data/hcup/ [16], provides access to AHRQ's thyroidectomy statistics from 2002.

Linking

Websites that link to each other are often similar. A list of links to other Websites provided by a Website is called a “site-ation,” similar to a list of citations to articles provided by an article. A Google search for link:Website finds pages that link to a Website. For example, a user can find sites that link to the National Guideline Clearinghouse [17], a database of practice guidelines, by searching link:www.guidelines.gov. One of the results is a Webliography [18] of databases of practice guidelines, including the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, which provides access to the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, National Health Service Economic Evaluation Database, and Health Technology Assessment Database [19].

Using the pearl as a search term

A Google search of a Website's address can result in similar Websites. For example, a search for the American Diabetes Association's Website, www.diabetes.org, results in Websites for international diabetes organizations such as Diabetes UK, Diabetes New Zealand, and Diabetes Centre Australia.

Using autonomous citation indexes (ACI)

Autonomous citation indexes (ACI), such as Citeseer [20], allow users to perform site-ation pearl growing with scholarly papers posted on the Web. CiteSeer is a database that allows users to first identify a relevant article and then access a list of articles that cited it. For example, users interested in problem-based learning in medical education could search for “problem-based AND medical education” in CiteSeer's database. One of the results is the article, “Problem-based Learning: A Paradigm Shift or a Passing Fad?” [21]. Citeseer can then display a list of articles that cited this article, which includes the research paper, “Skills to Enhance Problem-based Learning” [22].§

Using subject directories

An example of a subject directory is the Librarians' Index to the Internet (LII) [23]. A professor at the Catholic University of America, School of Library and Information Science, described LII as

a good collection of [Websites] on various subjects. All resources are cataloged/indexed, annotated, and stored in a database … Users can search or browse the database and use the index terms for citation pearl growing. [24]

For example, users interested in insulin as a treatment for diabetes may enter insulin diabetes into LII's search engine. One of the results is a hyperlink to the Food and Drug Administration's guide to diabetes treatments [25]. Users interested in finding other Websites about diabetes can click the subject heading “Diabetes.” One of the results is the American Diabetes Association. In addition, the terms in the subject headings may be used to search general search engines.

Using Websites' Webliographies

Websites sometimes recommend other Websites. For example, the American Heart Association includes a Webliography [26] of home pages from various organizations. The American Society of Echocardiography, Cardiovascular Research Foundation, and World Health Organization: Cardiovascular Diseases are included in the list.

Analyzing text

Users can find keywords in the relevant Website and use those words in a search engine. For example, a user interested in hospital statistics can do a Google search for two phrases from AHRQ's home page: “quality indicators” and “hospital statistics” [6]. One of the results provides hospital statistics in Maine, presented by the Governor's Office of Health Policy and Finance in October 2004 [27].

SITE-ATION PEARL GROWING AND LIBRARIANSHIP

Citation pearl growing, which librarians use regularly, and site-ation pearl growing, which might be unfamiliar to some librarians, overlap. In fact, some of the concepts underlying the site-ation pearl growing methods are rooted in librarianship history and theory, as shown in Table 1. This overlap shows that methods of searching the Internet are sometimes similar to methods of searching traditional sources of information.

Table 1 Overlap in methods of site-ation pearl growing and citation pearl growing and librarianship roots

graphic file with name i0025-7338-093-03-0397-t01.jpg

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DISCLOSURE

The author owns one share of Google, Inc.

Footnotes

† The full-text of all the Websites described in the article is available for free, and all searches are accurate as of September 15, 2004.

‡ In this article, Courier New font will be used to show verbatim searches and Courier New italic font will be used to show text that should be replaced by a user. Similar conventions are used in Google Hacks [14].

§ At the time of this writing, CiteSeer's scope was almost exclusively computer science.

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