Science and engineering libraries have an important role to play in preserving the intellectual content in research areas of the departments they serve. This study employs bibliographic data from the Web of Science database to examine how much research material is required to cover 90% of faculty citations in civil engineering and computer…

Examines the topic of Fuzzy Set Theory to determine the overlap of coverage in bibliographic databases. Highlights include examples of comparisons of database coverage; frequency distribution of the degree of overlap; records with maximum overlap; records unique to one database; intra-database duplicates; and overlap in the top ten databases.…

Applies a prefix trie index, or trie hashing, to the problem of providing fast search times, fast load times, and fast update properties in a bibliographic or full-text retrieval system with inverted files. Statistics are given for a test database consisting of an online catalog at the University of Western Ontario. (Author/LRW)

Describes an expert system that can identify documents erroneously categorized by indexers working within a prior category scheme. The discussion covers the results of a test of the system and its implications for automatic indexing systems. (14 references) (CLB)

Discusses the effect of including relevance data on the calculation of term discrimination values in bibliographic databases. Algorithms that calculate the ability of index terms to discriminate between relevant and non-relevant documents are described and tested. The results are discussed in terms of the relationship between term frequency and…

Describes a study that supported two hypotheses concerning the use of anaphors in information retrieval: first, that anaphors tend to refer to integral concepts rather than peripheral concepts; second, that various term weighting schemes are affected differently by anaphoric resolution. The implications for the use of anaphoric resolution for…

Summarizes the findings of a recent study on the indexing practices used in the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database. Descriptors, or indexing terms, from the thesaurus are analyzed; searching implications are discussed; and the relationship between the classification code and the descriptors is examined. (Contains 21…

Discussion of online bibliographic database searches focuses on a software system, SORT-AID/SABRE, that ranks retrieved citations in terms of relevance. Results of a comprehensive user evaluation of the relevance ranking procedure to determine its effectiveness are presented, and implications for future work are suggested. (10 references) (LRW)

An example of semantic pattern analysis, based on keywords selected from documents grouped by bibliographical coupling, is used to demonstrate the methodological aspects of knowledge discovery in bibliographic databases. Frequency distribution patterns suggest the existence of a common intellectual base with a wide range of specialties and…