Although indexing services continue to index scientific literature much as in the past, few any longer compile their indexing into the printed monthly and annual cumulations such as Index Medicus or Chemical Abstracts that once sat in long rows on university library shelves. The database products that have replaced cumulated print indexes nevertheless still depend on controlled vocabulary indexing as a means of achieving acceptable degrees of relevancy in retrieving citations from among millions of abstracts. To eliminate the many marginal “hits” that result from the unmediated keyword searching of large databases, search screens typically allow users to construct their ...
Less