Preliminary comparison of the Essie and PubMed search engines for answering clinical questions using MD on Tap, a PDA-based program for accessing biomedical literature.

MD on Tap, a PDA application that searches and retrieves biomedical literature, is specifically designed for use by mobile healthcare professionals. With the goal of improving the usability of the application, a preliminary comparison was made of two search engines (PubMed and Essie) to determine which provided most efficient path to the desired clinically-relevant information.