With more and more research dedicated to literature mining in the biomedical domain, more and more systems are available for people to choose from when building literature mining applications. In this study, we focus on one specific kind of literature mining task, i.e., detecting definitions of acronyms, abbreviations, and symbols in biomedical text. We denote acronyms, abbreviations, and symbols as short forms (SFs) and their corresponding definitions as long forms (LFs). The study was designed to answer the following questions, i) how well a system performs in detecting LFs from novel text, ii) what the coverage is for various terminological knowledge bases in including SFs as synonyms of their LFs, and iii) how to combine results from various SF knowledge bases.