Corpora: Subjective familiarity and objective frequency counts

[Patrick Ruch]

> On a related note, I'd appreciate pointers to any corpus of
> medical/pharmaceutical/nursing literature that might serve as the basis
for
> an empirical count of drug names in the professional or scientific press.

I do not know any public available corpora for such task. However, if the
target is the counting of drug names, then you could do the following:

-get a list of drugs an chemicals, such a list can be bought on the shelf,
and it is cheap. Usually they are 'representative' of the pharmacology
within a given country.

-For each item of this list you could query Medline (or any other medical
database), they you can count the number of retrieved document. I believe
some engines could even provides the number of occurrences for the
considered item. Maybe, (but I should check) Knowledge Finder can do that,
but if not then you always can do it.

-patrick
__________________________________
Patrick Ruch
HUG - Medical Informatics Division
CH-1211 Geneva 14
tel.: (+41 22) 372 61 64
fax: (+41 22) 372 48 55
email: Patrick.Ruch at dim.hcuge.ch