Introduction

Medline is a comprehensive bibliographic database for the life sciences. It consists of more than 13 million entries amounting to over 50 GB of data. The sheer size of this database makes searching difficult. A common method for reducing large amounts of input data is to index them. medMatch is a program for efficiently indexing genes in Medline entries. On a standard PC medMatch takes approximately 65 s for indexing 132 MB of Medline data with respect to all human genes. Although medMatch was originally developed for generating a human gene index, it is not restricted to any particular organism, as we explain in the following sections.