Demonstrates that the process of comparing each document in an automated system with all others during the classification procedure may be avoided by the use of an inverted file. (FM)

Examines the structure of medical informatics and the relationship between biomedicine and information science and information technology. Uses co-occurrence analysis of subject headings assigned to items indexed for MEDLINE as well as multidimensional scaling to show seven to eight broad multidisciplinary subject clusters. (Contains 28…

Discusses intellectual issues involved in the indexing of visual images, postulating that the indexing of images should provide access to images based on the attributes of those images and provide access to useful groupings of images. Four categories of image attributes are described, and issues to be considered in creating groups are discussed.…

The exponential growth in the literature of most fields has produced a near crisis situation for the people who provide storage and retrieval facilities for this same literature. One useful tool suggested for anyone interested in mechanizing the process of information storage and retrieval requires that vocabulary used in the system be divided…

Describes study that compared and judged the quality of subject indexing in online bibliographic databases. Documents from medical behavioral science literature are used with terms drawn from MEDLINE, PsychINFO, BIOSIS, and Excerpta Medica. Comparative statistics are presented on how each database links related documents and discriminates among…

These two articles discuss clustering structure in the Cystic Fibrosis Document Collection, which is derived from the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE file. The exhaustivity of four subject representations and two citation representations is examined, and descriptor-weight thresholds and similarity thresholds are used to compute…

Reports research results into a methodology for determining similarity between queries characterized by Boolean search request formulations and discusses similarity measures for Boolean combinations of index terms. Rationale behind these measures is outlined, and conditions ensuring their equivalence are identified. Results of an experiment…