Keywords given by authors of scientific articles in database descriptors

Isidoro Gil‐Leiva and Adolfo Alonso‐Arroyo

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2007, vol. 58, issue 8, 1175-1187

Abstract: In this article, the authors analyze the keywords given by authors of scientific articles and the descriptors assigned to the articles to ascertain the presence of the keywords in the descriptors. Six‐hundred forty INSPEC (Information Service for Physics, Engineering, and Computing), CAB (Current Agriculture Bibliography) abstracts, ISTA (Information Science and Technology Abstracts), and LISA (Library and Information Science Abstracts) database records were consulted. After detailed comparisons, it was found that keywords provided by authors have an important presence in the database descriptors studied; nearly 25% of all the keywords appeared in exactly the same form as descriptors, with another 21% though normalized, still detected in the descriptors. This means that almost 46% of keywords appear in the descriptors, either as such or after normalization. Elsewhere, three distinct indexing policies appear, one represented by INSPEC and LISA (indexers seem to have freedom to assign the descriptors they deem necessary); another is represented by CAB (no record has fewer than four descriptors and, in general, a large number of descriptors is employed). In contrast, in ISTA, a certain institutional code exists towards economy in indexing because 84% of records contain only four descriptors.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20595

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:58:y:2007:i:8:p:1175-1187

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().