Supplementary Notes3

The relevance assessment (see Supplementary notes 2) for each topic was performed independently by the co-authors thereby, compensating for the variations across individual perceptions and time of search. There was about 3.4% variation in the ratio of relevant hits to that of the total hits, across the repetitions.

Variation across repetitive searches

Objective	No. of independent searches performed	Average difference across repetitions		Average % difference in the ratio of relevant hits to the total no. of hits
Objective	No. of independent searches performed	Total no. of hits	No. of relevant hits
microRNAs involved in translational repression as (potential) markers for breast cancer	2	7.67	0.17	0.5
piRNA reports in non-testicular cells/tissues	3	4.22	2.64	4.99
Quadruplex DNA/RNA NMR studies in the context of HIV	3	4.56	1.85	4.58

The average of the % differences [i.e. 0.5, 4.99, 4.58] for the ratio of relevant hits to the total no. of hits was hence 3.4% across all searches.