Abstract
The quality of subject indexing by Chemical Ab stracts Indexing Service is studied by confronting authors with the particular indexing terms attributed to their papers Data were drawn from the online ( A-file, available from STN host- computer. for 270 articles published in 54 journals, five arti cles out of each journal Responses (80%) indicate the supe rior quality of keywords, both as content descriptors and as retrieval tools. Author judgements on these two different aspects do not always converge, however. cas's indexing pol icy to cover only "new" aspects is reflected in authors judge ments that index lists are somewhat incomplete, in particular in the case of thesaurus terms (index headings). The large effort expended by CAS in maintaining and using a subject thesaurus, in order to select valid index headings, as com pared to quick and cheap keyword postings, does not lead to clear superior quality of thesaurus terms for document de scription nor in retrieval Some 20% of papers were not placed in the "proper" CA main-section, according to authors As concerns the use of indexing data by third parties, e.g in bibliometries, users should be aware of the indexing policies behind the data, in order to prevent invalid interpretations.
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