Journal article
Optimal document-indexing vocabulary for MEDLINE
Information processing & management, Vol.32(5), pp.503-514
1996
DOI: 10.1016/0306-4573(96)00025-8
Abstract
The indexing vocabulary is an important determinant of success in text retrieval. Researchers have compared the effectiveness of indexing using free-text and controlled vocabularies in a variety of text contexts. A number of studies have investigated the relative merits of free-text, MeSH and UMLS Metathesaurus indexing vocabularies for MEDLINE document indexing. Most of these studies conclude that controlled vocabularies offer no advantages in retrieval performance over free-text. This paper offers a detailed analysis of prior results and their underlying experimental designs. The analysis indicates that there are a number of open questions relevant to the overall debate on indexing vocabularies for MEDLINE. This paper also offers results from a new experiment assessing eight different retrieval strategies. These strategies involve document indexing via free-text, MeSH and several alternative combinations of the two vocabularies. The results indicate that MeSH does have an important role in text retrieval.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Optimal document-indexing vocabulary for MEDLINE
- Creators
- Padmini Srinivasan - School of Library and Information Science, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, U.S.A
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Information processing & management, Vol.32(5), pp.503-514
- Publisher
- Elsevier Ltd
- DOI
- 10.1016/0306-4573(96)00025-8
- ISSN
- 0306-4573
- eISSN
- 1873-5371
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 1996
- Academic Unit
- Nursing; Computer Science; Business Analytics
- Record Identifier
- 9984003010802771
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