%0 Journal Article %T Usability survey of biomedical question answering systems %A Bauer Michael A %A Berleant Daniel %J Human Genomics %D 2012 %I BioMed Central %R 10.1186/1479-7364-6-17 %X We live in an age of access to more information than ever before. This can be a double-edged sword. Increased access to information allows for more informed and empowered researchers, while information overload becomes an increasingly serious risk. Thus, there is a need for intelligent information retrieval systems that can summarize relevant and reliable textual sources to satisfy a user's query. Question answering is a specialized type of information retrieval with the aim of returning precise short answers to queries posed as natural language questions. We present a review and comparison of three biomedical question answering systems: askHERMES (http://www.askhermes.org/), EAGLi (http://eagl.unige.ch/EAGLi/), and HONQA (http://services.hon.ch/cgi-bin/QA10/qa.pl). %U http://www.humgenomics.com/content/6/1/17