Describes a framework for building "story traces" (compact global views of a narrative) and "story projects" (selections of key elements of a narrative) and their applications in text understanding and classification. The resulting "abstract story traces" provide a compact view of the underlying narrative's key…

Reviews the factors to be considered in evaluating abstracts. Types of abstracts, content, length, writing style, comprehensive criteria for abstracts, readability, readability testing, compatibility with ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standards, and informativeness are among the topics covered. (12 references) (KRN)

Some of the factors that must inevitably affect the assessment of printed indexes are discussed, together with the observation of two unexpected phenomena, namely an apparent relationship between precision and searching effort, and relationships between generality and both recall and fallout. (4 references) (Author)

Proposes indexing technical information by function and attribute instead of indexing by subject to increase retrieval efficiency. Reasons for the lack of accurate and comprehensive technical product information in databases and the need for an improvement in reference services are discussed. (RBF)

Discusses strengths of abstracting and indexing services (subject coverage, resolution of language problems, systematic indexing) and summarizes sources, countries of origin, languages, total coverage, and indexing of four scientific and technical services--Biosis, Engineering Information, Inspec, Chemical Abstracts Service. Characteristics of…

Presents a general overview of the development of Information Science Abstracts. The historical perspective, including the contributions of individuals and institutions, is discussed; its coverage is compared with that of other information science databases; and retrieval capabilities are described. (four references) (Author/CLB)

Provides a brief background of the Biological Abstracts' title index, "Biological Abstracts' Subject in Context" (BASIC) "Stop List," or compilation of nonsignificant words that were going to be automatically stopped from printing. Notes that the Stop List provided an improvement over the raw computer output of titles while…

THIS PAPER IS A CASE STUDY OF THE ADOPTION BY GEOSCIENCE ABSTRACTS OF UNIDEK, A COMPUTER-COMPILED SYSTEMATIC SUBJECT INDEX BASED ON THE UNIVERSAL DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION (UDC). EVENTS LEADING TO A DECISION TO ADOPT THE SYSTEM, SOME THEORY OF INDEXES, PROBLEMS INVOLVED IN CONVERSION, AND SOME OF THE RESULTS ACHIEVED ARE REVIEWED. UNIDEK MAKES…

Work has been performed on a fully automated approach for the general categorization of documents based on a training set of document titles and abstracts and journal-level indexing of the journals in which the documents are published. The goal of this research is to automatically index documents using a consistent, timely set of controlled…

An experiment was conducted based on an information service for planners run in conjunction with Geo Abstracts Limited. Forth-eight styles of abstracting journals were produced which, although based on the same source material, differed in depth of coverage, frequency of publication, content of entry, and whether an index was included. One style…

Presents an evaluative analysis of five indexing/abstracting services covering sports and physical education. Data on the scope, arrangement, indexing language, journal coverage, subject access, special features, and use aids in each of the services are presented in four tables. (JL)

Compares "Library Literature" with "Library and Information Science Abstracts" (LISA) and outlines searching LISA on the SilverPlatter CD-ROM. Use of indexes and abstracts to aid information retrieval is explained; abstracting services are described; and five steps in writing an abstract are listed. Abstracts and annotations…

Discussion of the adequacy of indexing for interdisciplinary areas focuses on women's studies. A study that examined access to women's studies journals through standard indexes and abstracts is described, and results are reported which indicate that most journals are not sufficiently indexed and that there is a need for an online index. (six…

This paper argues that as the number of concordance lines presented to researchers increases in line with ever-growing corpus size, the automatic selection of the most central lines will become more important. A method will be presented for selecting the most representative members from a set of concordance lines on the basis of repeated lexical…

The Simple Index Method overcomes the difficulties in building a core list for serials in interdisciplinary fields by using multiple indexes which cover various aspects of the subject. Collection-development librarians can develop a core list when standard bibliographies or specific indexing and abstracting tools are lacking and can tailor that…