Machine-aided title word indexing for a weekly current awareness publication

Abstract

The growth in number and size of scholarly journals has had a concomitant effect on secondary information services such as Current Contents (CC). To allow an alternative to scanning contents pages, a Weekly Subject Index (WSI) was made available to CC users in 1972. The WSI permits quick access through title words to articles of particular interest and allows retrospective searching of very recent literature. Because of rapid turn-around requirements the production system for the index is computerized with only minimal manual editing done prior to keying. The automated system was recently redesigned to allow the creation of complex bound terms through the use of several stored dictionaries. These include two stop-word, two variant-preferred, and two word-phrase dictionaries, which among them allow up to four sequential words to be combined into one term. Word order within a bound term can be inverted to create a single posting for phrases which can occur in varying sequences. Thus “changes in blood flow” and “blood flow changes” both appear as “blood flow, changes” in the index, avoiding the need for cross-references and double lookups for the user. Such bound terms have greater precision and information content than single title words and their creation increases the efficiency of the WSI for the user.