Comparing BioKDE search engine with those of PubMed, Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar
The search function at BioKDE performs better than those of PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/), Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) and Semantic Scholar (https://semanticscholar.org) based on our preliminary comparisons. Below are some examples. We only compared the top 20 returned articles.
When ranking articles, PubMed does not consider the number of citations an article received; Google Scholar does not consider article type (i.e. whether an article is a review); and Semantic Scholar does not consider article type. BioKDE ranking considers the following factors: keyword relevancy, number of citations, publication date, publication type and journal impact factor.
“cancer”
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PubMed returned relatively new articles related to cancer in general. Most of the articles are reviews.
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Google Scholar returned many articles related to cancer statistics of different times with mostly old articles.
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Semantic Scholar returned articles related to cancer, which are not very recent. One needs to select Review from the Publication Type filter to see review articles.
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BioKDE returned highly cited review articles related to cancer published in the past three years. Because the articles are highly cited, the topics look more interesting than those articles returned by other search engines.
“breast cancer”
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PubMed returned relatively new articles related to breast cancer in general. Many of them are review articles.
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Google Scholar returned mostly old articles with high citations with very few articles published after 2010. When clicking sorting by dates, many latest conference abstracts showed up, which are likely not one would like to find.
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Semantic Scholar returned relatively old articles when publication time was not used as a filtering condition.
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BioKDE returned new highly cited review articles related to breast cancer. Because the articles are highly cited, the topics look more interesting than those articles returned by other search engines.
“breast cancer chemotherapy”
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PubMed returned a good number of recently published review articles. Some articles are not very relevant to breast cancer chemotherapy.
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Google Scholar again returned mostly old articles with high citations. Sorting by dates returned many conference abstracts.
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Semantic Scholar returned relatively new articles for this query, but not as relevant as what BioKDE returned.
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BioKDE returned many recently published highly cited articles or highly cited review articles related to breast cancer chemotherapy.
“breast cancer chemotherapy and immunotherapy”
The user may want to find out article related to combining chemotherapy and immunotherapy or comparison between chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
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PubMed returned a small number of articles truly related to both breast cancer chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
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Google Scholar only returned very small number of recently published article related to both chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
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Semantic Scholar returned articles similar to those of PubMed about only one type of treatment instead of both treatments.
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BioKDE returned articles related to both breast cancer chemotherapy and immunotherapy and many of them are recently published.
“gene expression biomarkers for breast cancer chemotherapy response”
PubMed, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar and BioKDE returned quite different results. It is obvious that BioKDE returned many more relevant articles than PubMed, Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar.
In general, BioKDE returns clearly better results for complex queries.
If you have done any comparison and find examples for which other search engines perform better than BioKDE, please let us know (contact@insilicom.com).