Describes a scheme in the United Kingdom that coordinates geochemistry publications with a computerized geochemistry database. The database comprises not only data published in the journals but also the remainder of the pertinent data set. The discussion covers the database design; collection, storage and retrieval of data; and plans for future…

Discussion of information retrieval and the derivation of new knowledge from bibliographic databases focuses on medical journal literature. Topics discussed include the incomplete coverage of medical literature on databases; searching by free text or title words versus searching by assigned subject headings; and the implications of these factors…

Farradane's relational indexing appeared applicable to the scientific area of the properties of metals and gave good results with a greater depth of indexing. (Author/PF)

Discusses how new knowledge may be generated by information retrieval techniques on bibliographic databases. Examples from medical research are used to illustrate the possibility of making discoveries by synthesizing the literature; hidden correlations between factors are discussed; and the creative use of information retrieval systems is…

Information extraction (IE) is the extraction and recording of information about a prespecified set of entities, relations, or events from natural language texts in structured representations called templates. This article provides an overview of IE from the 1960s to the present, discusses techniques, describes applications, and highlights future…

A test was carried out to investigate the assumption that there is a significant level of redundancy between documents. The conclusions were that notional overlap exists, but there appear to be very few cases of extreme redundancy, and at the document level, there is little possibility of practical application. (Author)

An investigation was made into the relative performance of the four major Chemical Abstracts Service magnetic tape data-bases. The overall retrieval efficiency of profiles searched against data-bases containing titles only, titles-plus-keywords, and titles-plus-digests, was calculated and these results are presented. (5 references) (Author/NH)

Reports the results of experiments using colon classification for the analysis, representation, and retrieval of primary information from the full text of documents. Recall, precision, and search length measures indicate colon classification did not perform significantly better than Boolean or simple word occurrence systems. Thirteen references…

An n-gram is a string of characters, usually adjacent, extracted from a section of continuous text that can be used in spelling error detection and correction, query expansion, information retrieval, dictionary search, text compression, and language identification applications. This article provides an introduction to the use of n-grams in textual…

Surveys the literature of the field. Includes a 152-item bibliography. (PF)

Substantial alterations to a system often have little or no effect on particular collections. This may be due to poor separation of relevant and non-relevant documents. The paper presents a procedure for characterizing this separation, which can show whether proposed modifications of the base system are likely to be useful. (8 references)…

Describes a study in which several different sets of hypertext links are inserted by different people in full-text documents. The degree of similarity between the sets is measured using coefficients and topological indices. As in comparable studies of inter-indexer consistency, the sets of links used by different people showed little similarity.…

Indexing is the preprocessing of information to enable its retrieval, ranging from classification-based (precoordinate) to keyword searching (postcoordinate) approaches. This article describes a framework for modelling information retrieval systems in terms of sets of objects, relationships, and functions and discusses the application of indexing…

Presents a user-oriented interface for generalized informetric analysis and demonstrates how informetric calculations can be specified through advanced data modeling techniques. Topics include bibliographic data; online information retrieval systems; citation networks; query interface; impact factors; data restructuring; and multi-level…

Describes a study funded by the Commission of the European Community that applied document retrieval algorithms to the "Excerpta Medica" database using the EMTREE thesaurus. Nonhierarchical relations were added to enrich the thesaurus, and document ranking is discussed in terms of the conceptual distance between the documents and the…