A companson is made of the relevance and quality of 24 SDI profiles on the INSPEC database, before and after the introduction of searchable abstract words. It was found that there was an approximately 40% increase in both the total number of hits and the number of relevant hits, with no statistically significant changes in relevance. It is suggested that when good abstracts are wntten, indexing terms may be unnecessary.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
R. Wagers, Effective searching in database abstracts, Online7 (5) ( 1983) 60-77.
2.
F.H. Barker , D.C. Veal and B.K. Wyatt, Comparative efficiency of searching titles, abstracts and index, Journal of Documentation28 ( 1 ) ( 1972) 122-136.
3.
M. Herz, H.K. Kaindl, A.A. Salib and R. Warszawski, Comparative efficiency of searching abstract text in the Chemical Abstracts database, Journal of Chemical information and Computing Science25 ( 2) ( 1985 ) 111-114.
4.
D. Hawkins , Inspec on Dialog, Database5 (4) ( 1982) 12-25.
