Abstract
MEDLINE is the largest biomedical literature database. It is updated daily with 200-4,000 citations. This permanent growth induces the need of a good MEDLINE abstract clustering to accelerate the procedure of research and information retrieval. Several works have been developed in this context, but clustering MEDLINE abstracts are still an area where researchers are trying to propose new approaches to better clustering. Over the last few years, evolutionary algorithms have been widely applied to clustering problems because of their ability to avoid local optimal solutions and converge to a global one. In this article, a new approach is proposed for clustering MEDLINE abstracts based on an extension of an evolutionary algorithm which is the genetic algorithm combined with a Vector Space Model and an agglomerative algorithm.