Development of the EDDA study design terminology to enhance retrieval of clinical and bibliographic records in dispersed repositories

Medical terminology varies across disciplines and reflects linguistic differences in communities of clinicians, researchers, and indexers. Inconsistency of terms for the same concepts and lack of machine-readable metadata impede discovery of information artifacts, such as records of clinical reports and scientific articles that reside in various repositories. To facilitate discovery, retrieval, and data sharing, the medical community maintains an assortment of terminologies, thesauri, and ontologies. Valuable resources include the US National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), Elsevier Life Science thesaurus (Emtree), and the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIT). It is increasingly important to identify medical investigations by their design features, as these have implications for evidence regarding research questions.