A set of skills thought to contribute to effectiveness in searching subject indexes is defined. Of these, one group was selected for study, namely skills thought to focus a search. An objective test to measure these skills was administered to 129 students and established to have content validity, and some degree of construct validity. The skills involved did not corre late highly with each other, and are to be regarded, at least for the time being, as five separate skills, An attempt to establish the criterion, or predictive validity of the subtests of the focusing skills failed to either validate or invalidate them because of wide errors of measurement in the subtests, but more particularly in a performance test of index searching. It is suggested that future work should attempt to find practicable ways of improving test accuracy, and also that the cognitive dimensions of document relevance be investigated.
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