title: Medical and dermatology dictionaries: an examination of unstructured definitions and a proposal for the future.
abstract: Medical dictionaries serve to describe and clarify the term set used by medical professionals. In this commentary, we analyze a representative set of skin disease definitions from 2 prominent medical dictionaries, Stedman's Medical Dictionary and Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary. We find that there is an apparent lack of stylistic standards with regard to content and form. We advocate a new standard form for the definition of medical terminology, a standard to complement the easy-to-read yet unstructured style of the traditional dictionary entry. This new form offers a reproducible structure, paving the way for the development of a computer readable "dictionary" of medical terminology. Such a dictionary offers immediate update capability and a fundamental improvement in the ability to search for relationships between terms.
authors.affiliation: Department of Dermatology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 27599-7287, USA.
authors.forename: David Todd
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: DeVries
authors.forename: Art
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Papier
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Byrnes
authors.forename: Lowell A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Goldsmith
mesh_terms: D003880:Dermatology; D004018:Dictionaries, Medical as Topic; D005544:Forecasting; D009626:Terminology as Topic