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Abstract

Eighty-nine articles from a small, Danish left-wing newspaper were indexed by PRECIS and KWIC. The articles cover a wide range of social science subjects. Controlled test searches in both indexes were carried out by 20 students of library science. The results obtained from this small-scale retrieval test were evaluated by a chi-square test. The PRECIS index led to more correct answers and fewer wrong answers than the KWIC index, i.e. it had both better recall and greater precision. Furthermore, the students were more confident in their judgement of the relevance of retrieved articles in the PRECIS index than in the KWIC index: and they generally favoured the PRECIS index in the subjective judgement they were asked to make.

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References

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Subject indexing in the social sciences: a comparison of PRECIS and KWIC indexes to newspaper articles

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