Amigos Partners with Quertle to Offer Biomedical Literature Search Engine

Amigos is pleased to be able to join with vendor partner Quertle® LLC to offer its primary product, Quetzal, to Amigos members.

Quetzal is a biomedical literature search engine that uses simple strategies that contain few keywords combined with an extensive biomedical vocabulary and filter sets that mirror the discovery process often used by biomedical researchers.

A recent review of Quetzel in the publication American Laboratory offered this: Quetzal goes beyond keyword searching by integrating natural language processing to extract phrases that emphasize the relevance of the search result. Quetzal addresses many of the shortcomings of standard keyword-based search algorithms, such as providing a biomedically focused ontology that contains verbs and extracts relevant statements from the search results.

The mode of conducting searches is also geared toward discovery (i.e., searching for a general topic and filtering), which is generally how researchers approach literature searching.

Quetzal (also known as Quertle V5.0) was developed by biologists to solve the searching problems they encountered while conducting biomedical research. Instead of relying solely on the coincident presence of keywords within the indexed text, Quetzal generates specific search results using what the company calls Quantum Logic Linguistic Technology to retrieve articles that contain assertions about relationships between the search terms. This technology combines natural language processing and statistical algorithms to tease out relevant statements made by authors within the text.

"We are pleased to collaborate with Amigos Library Services to provide Quertle's ground-breaking literature search technology to Amigos member institutions," said Jeffrey D. Saffer, President and CEO, Quertle. "Amigos, with its more than 700 member libraries, is a valued partner in introducing our product."

To learn more about Quetzel, visit the Quertle website. For information on special pricing available to Amigos members, contact Christopher Burke, burke@amigos.org or 800-843-8482, ext. 2805.