A customized, specialty-oriented database and index of a subject matter area and methods for constructing and using such a database are provided. Selection and indexing of articles is done by experts in the topic with which the database is concerned. As a result, articles are indexed in a manner that allows facile, rapid retrieval of highly relevant articles with few or no false positives with much reduced database maintenance cost through frugal limitation of number of documents in the database, number of terms in a Master Index, and number of codes assigned to each document. A thesaurus allows indexing and search in accordance with terminology familiar to different anticipated groups of users (e.g. doctors, patients, nurses, technicians, and the like). Key articles collections and rapid access to documents therein are also provided.