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Objective: Assess the performance of the SAPHIRE automated information retrieval system.

Design: Comparative study of automated and human searching of a MEDLINE test collection.

Measurements: Recall and precision of SAPHIRE were compared with those attributes of novice physicians, expert physicians, and librarians for a test collection of 75 queries and 2,334 citations. Failure analysis assessed the efficacy of the Metathesaurus as a concept vocabulary; the reasons for retrieval of nonrelevant articles and nonretrieval of relevant articles; and the effect of changing the weighting formula for relevance ranking of retrieved articles.

Results: Recall and precision of SAPHIRE were comparable to those of both physician groups, but less than those of librarians.

Conclusion: The current version of the Metathesaurus, as utilized by SAPHIRE, was unable to …