What is ReleMed? ReleMed, short of Relevant Medicine is a "Google-like search engine for medical literature," created by researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. ReleMed is intended to provide medical professionals, researchers and the public with "more efficient and targeted way to search PubMed." ReleMed was designed to increase specificity and return more relevant results by finding the query words within sentences and statistical relationship between the them.

Some folks on MEDLIB-L have already begun to look at and discuss ReleMed. David Rothman who has been "playing with Relemed for a few weeks" and is impressed by its relevance sorting, directed list readers to the free, full-text article "Relemed: sentence-level search engine with relevance score for the MEDLINE database of biomedical articles" by Siadaty, M. S., Shu, J., Knaus, W. A. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making about Relemed 2007, 7:1 doi:10.1186/1472-6947-7-1.

According to the article, "There are more than 30 retrieval services that use MEDLINE as their data source, some of which are shown in Table 1. Some use MEDLINE as the main or the only data source, such as PubMed, OVID, SLIM, askMEDLINE, and eTBLAST. Others use multiple databases, e.g. MedMiner. Some return articles as their main results (PubMed), while others return some digested form, such as a graph (Chilibot and ConceptLink). Some focus on data-mining, MedBlast and HAPI (High-density Array Pattern Interpreter); others on genomics or proteomics (GoPubMed and iHOP). Some are designed for "literature-based discovery", finding relationships between biomedical concepts from MEDLINE that are not expressed in any article directly, e.g. Arrowsmith and BITOLA. Some are specialized in the classification of articles, e.g. AnneOTate, CISMeF, and MedMOLE." The authors of the article state that the majority of these search engines do not estimate relevance scores and none of them "incorporate relationship between the words in computing the relevance score."

As relationship search engines become more prevalent we need to start evaluating these search engines and comparing them to each other.