As a change of pace, here’s a Resource Highlight post of a non-health specific tool. The Online OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a resource on the web that converts your PDF documents into free-text documents which can then be saved to Word, .txt, or .rtf files.

Online OCR is useful for those conducting research and dealing with large number of PDF items. By applying OCR technology to your document, it becomes easier to search for sections or topics within the paper by looking for words that describe what you want. When PDF documents are scanned from physical books or journals they do not have the capability to search for words individually. OCR alleviates this problem and allows you to find what you want quickly and efficiently.

Note that certain documents, especially copies scanned from old texts, may not covert accurately which causes indecipherable characters to appear every now and again. OCR is not always 100% accurate, but it gets you closer to searching free-text than a static photocopy of a page. Also, Online OCR has a no fee version (converting 14 pages in one hour) and membership rates for converting a lot of pages or documents.