Metonymies in medical terminologies. A SNOMED CT case study.

Markus Kreuzthaler, Stefan Schulz

Abstract read

In one paragraph

Article in AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it

0cells of the map it votes in

1citing papers in PubMed

–field-weighted citation impact

1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

European consensus on endoscopic surgery for bilateral vocal fold immobility: classification and nomenclature.European archives of oto-rhino-laryngology : official journal of the European Federation of Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Societies (EUFOS) : affiliated with the German Society for Oto-Rhino-Laryngology - Head and Neck Surgery · 2025
Article

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Markus KreuzthalerInstitute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation, Medical University, Graz, Austria.

Stefan Schulz

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Metonymies are language phenomena, in which one expression is used to refer to a related one. Whereas there are many examples in medical discourse, it has been controversially discussed to what extent metonymic phenomena also matter in medical terminologies like SNOMED CT, where they could hamper their proper use. We investigated this by analyzing all SNOMED CT single word fully specified names containing the suffixes "-itis" and "-ectomy". Using a combination of string and concept matching, we harvested definitional phrases from the Web and contrasted them with the terms and their logical definitions as stated in SNOMED CT. Whereas metonymic phenomena are very rare in the collection of surgical terms (two out of 138), they were found in 16 terms (out of 251) in the collection of inflammation terms. Web mining retrieved useful phrases for 11 of these terms. Most metonymies found corresponded to the "whole for part" and "general for specific" pattern.

Indexed as

LinguisticsSystematized Nomenclature of MedicineTerminology as TopicLanguage

Identifiers

PMID23304317

PMCPMC3540502

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata

Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.