Because of an absence of theory, rules and conventions for thesaurus construction and maintenance, an investigation of how thesauri are actually updated was conducted. Two concepts crucial to any theoretical foundation of thesauri and two techniques for systematic updating of a thesaurus are presented for consideration. (46 references) (Author/KE)

Zipf's law states that if words in a text are arranged in decreasing order of occurrence, then the product of the rank of a word and the number of times it occurs is a constant of that text. Examination of the probabilities of occurrence of multi-word phrases in information retrieval in relation to the probabilities of occurrence of single words…

Explores similarities between research approaches characterizing different paradigms in information science and different information-processing styles of individual researchers. Proposes a model of the way in which new knowledge is generated, based on these similarities. The model focuses on "research pathologies," and ways in which the…