How a general and a specific thesaurus cover expressions in patients' questions and physicians' answers

Purpose: This study examines to which degree General Finnish Thesaurus (GFT) and FinMeSH cover various semantic expressions of medical concepts in patients' questions and physicians' answers concerning cardiovascular diseases. The former represent lay persons’ information needs. Methodology: 50 question answer pairs were collected in a medical Web site. Concepts and their expressions (terms) with their semantic relations were identified in questions and answers. Findings: FinMeSH covered 65 % and GFT 41 % of all medical terms in texts. The expressions of patients and physicians matched better with FinMeSH than GFT regardless of the type of expression. The difference in favor of FinMeSH was typically about 25 %units. Implications: The low fit with users' vocabularies makes GFT a poor tool for supporting searching, whereas the relatively high fit of FinMeSH suggests that it is a reasonable tool in assisting searching. Conclusions concerning the bridging of these two thesauri are discussed.