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

Purpose – This paper sets out to examine the degree to which General Finnish Thesaurus (GFT) and FinMeSH cover various semantic expressions of medical concepts in patients' questions and physicians' answers concerning cardiovascular diseases. The former represents lay persons' information needs. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 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 per cent and GFT 41 per cent 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 favour of FinMeSH was typically about 25 per cent‐units. Originality/value – 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.