Clara M. Chu and Isola Ajiferuke
The study compares the quality of indexing in library and information science databases (Library Literature (LL), Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), and Information…
Abstract
The study compares the quality of indexing in library and information science databases (Library Literature (LL), Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), and Information Science Abstracts (ISA)). An alternative method to traditional retrieval effectiveness tests, suggested by White and Griffith in their paper ‘Quality of indexing in online databases’ [13], is adopted to measure the quality of the controlled vocabulary of each database. The method involves identifying clusters of documents that are similar in content, searching for each document from a given cluster in a database, identifying the terms used by the databases to index each document, and calculating certain measures to determine the quality of indexing. Problems found with the White and Griffith discrimination index led the authors to propose an alternative discrimination index which takes into consideration the collection size of a database. Our analysis shows that LISA has the best quality of indexing out of the three databases.
JEAN TAGUE and ISOLA AJIFERUKE
Two dynamic models of library circulation, the Markov model originally proposed by Morse and the mixed Poisson model proposed by Burrell and Cane, are applied to a large…
Abstract
Two dynamic models of library circulation, the Markov model originally proposed by Morse and the mixed Poisson model proposed by Burrell and Cane, are applied to a large eleven‐year university circulation data set. Goodness of fit tests indicate that neither model fits the data. In both cases, the set of non‐circulating items is larger than that predicted by the model.
Ajiferuke showed that observed author distributions can best be described by a shifted inverse Gaussian‐Poisson distribution. Yet, in the framework of a model to explain observed…
Abstract
Ajiferuke showed that observed author distributions can best be described by a shifted inverse Gaussian‐Poisson distribution. Yet, in the framework of a model to explain observed fractional distributions of authors it is important to know whether a simple one‐parameter distribution such as a geometric or a truncated Poisson can adequately describe observed author distributions, at least in those fields where the single author is still dominant. In this article it is shown that for the field of information science this is indeed the case.