We produce a fairly large medical reference site with a couple of thousand or so pages. Each page has a number of sub-headings (which can be nested down several levels).
In addition to a full-text search, we have a "suggestion" drop down based on a manually curated index. These indexes are inserted at the sub-section level (because they are also used for page references in a printed book version).
As users start typing in the suggestion box, we match indexes based on the partial string as they type and present a short list of indexes (for example, "ele" could return "elephant", "electricity", "electrical" - if we had those words indexed). Indexes are also document/section specific - so there may be multiple "elephant" indexes - one that links to the "elephant" section of an "africa" document; one that links to the word "elephant" in the "mammals" section of a document titled "animals"; or one that links to a specific "elephant" document.
The suggestions for "ele" would look a bit like:
Elephants
Elephants (in Africa)
Elephants (in Animals / Mammals)
Electricity
Electrical
...
If a user clicks on a suggestion result they are currently taken to the sub-section where the index has been placed.
My question is - in an electronic environment, with some documents running several A4 pages long, is it good practice to link people to the sub-section (there is a concern that important medical information prior to that sub-section is being skipped) or should we link them to the top of the document only?
What is the common practice?