Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) -- Table of Contents
Richard Hill
American Society for Information Science
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
[email protected]VOLUME 49, NUMBER 14 (DECEMBER 1998)
CONTENTSIN THIS ISSUE
Bert R. Boyce, 1245IN MEMORIAM
Phyllis Allen Richmond: Award of Merit Winner Dies at 76,
Pauline Atherton Cochrane, 1246We begin sadly with Cochrane's memoriam for one of my former teachers, an award of merit winner, and a true lady, Phyllis Richmond. She would have enjoyed this issue with its emphasis on subject searching and classification.
RESEARCH
- Searching through Cyberspace: The Effects of Link Cues and Correspondence on Information Retrieval from Hypertext on the World Wide Web,
Kushal Khan and Craig Locatis, 1248Khan, and Locatis investigate the effect of the density of hypertext links on an index type page, and whether the links should appear within the text of paragraphs, or in lists constructed for that purpose. Sixty-four magnet high school students searched a 15-page document on an unfamiliar topic structured into 9 chapters and linked to 18 related external documents. The four versions had either high or low density links and either list or in paragraph link placement. Search time and numbers of links were recorded by observers. The use of lists of links and low density display produces positive effects upon overall performance.
- Partial Coordination. I. The Best of Pre-Coordination,
Ajit Kambil and David Bodoff, 1270Bodoff and Kambil in Partial Coordination, part I, present a major review of the retrieval characteristics of pre and post coordinate indexing languages. They suggest that indexers assign not only subject terms but other "dependency" terms, context providing terms that are linked to subject terms much in the same manner as links were used in retrieval 30 years ago.
- Partial Coordination. II. A Preliminary Evaluation and Failure Analysis
Kambil and Bodoff in Partial Coordination, part II, implement partial coordination by incrementing a document's relevance score if a query term occurs in the document's index and that term's dependency terms also appear in the query and not otherwise. Seven queries were chosen from the TREC3 ad hoc queries, and TIPSTER documents ranked by the Cornell group for these queries were chosen as the 418 document test set. Queries were TREC descriptions less stop words, or were selected by MBA students. All words were treated as single terms and stemmed. In most cases precision increased considerably at some loss in recall.
- Library Journal Use and Citation Half-Life in Medical Science,
Ming-Yueh Tsay, 1283Tsay compares in-house use half-life with citation half-life of the 835 title journal collection of the Library of Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, using re-shelving data on year of publication for a six-month period in 93/94, and using Journal Citation Reports from 1993. Citation half-lives are significantly greater than use half-lives; use analysis indicating rapid obsolescence. Older journals and journals published monthly have longer half-lives.
- Document Representations and Clues to Document Relevance,
Carol L. Barry, 1293Barry finds that judgments of evaluators of the relevance of documents based upon document surrogates vary with the nature of the document representation used. To determine what aspects affect such judgments, 18 subjects were provided answers to their questions in the form of descriptive cataloging, notes, abstracts, and index terms on separate pages, and asked to mark causes of acceptance or rejection and interviewed about their choices. Titles and abstracts appear to be better indicators of relevance than index terms, but the clues seem to depend more on users context than on document representation. Different sorts of representation vary in their ability to provide clues to specific traits.
- Filtering Medical Documents Using Automated and Human Classification Methods,
J. Mostafa, L. M. Quiroga, and M. Palakal, 1304The application of information filtering to Internet supplied documents is analogous to SDI and, to a lesser extent, retrospective information retrieval systems. Mostafa, Quiroga and Palakal use terms extracted from sample documents and a clustering algorithm to create a single place document classification whose centroids provided a match for the assignment of new documents. New documents are converted to term vectors, based on an existing thesaurus. Documents are then assigned to the class whose centroid has the minimum distance from the document vector. Using user preferences modified by feedback of user generated relevance judgments, the classes are prioritized for each user.
From 7500 records in 15 cell biology MeSH categories, 6000 titles and abstracts for the training set were used to generate 22 centroids, and the remainder for testing. The highly homogenous automatically generated classes performed better than the less homogenous, and a wide variation was present. The manually applied MeSH classification outpreformed the automatic.
- Invoked on the Web,
Blaise Cronin, Herbert W. Snyder, Howard Rosenbaum, Anna Martinson, and Ewa Callahan, 1319"Invocation" is used by Cronin et al. as a term including the concepts of citation and acknowledgment but also other modalities representing world wide web linkages in the area of scholarly communication. Five search engines were used to search for invocations of five names of a highly cited library school faculty. Content analysis led to eleven form-based categories of pages invoked. Performances of the engines are quite different with one providing 516 unique hits and another only 17. The rankings of the subjects by numbers of invocations do not correlate with citation rankings.
BOOK REVIEWS
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- Java in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference,
by David Flanagan
Reviewed by: Michael R. Leach, 1329- Readings in Agents,
edited by Michael N. Huhns and Munindar P. Singh
Reviewed by: Jeff White, 1330- Guide to Finding Legal and Regulatory Information on the Internet,
by Yvonne J. Chandler
Reviewed by: Penny A. Hazelton, 1332- Information of the Image (2nd ed.),
by Allan D. Pratt
Reviewed by: Charles Cole, 1333- User and Task Analysis for Interface Design,
by JoAnn T. Hackos and Janice C. Redish
Reviewed by: Jonathan Kies, 1334- Research Misconduct: Issues, Implications, and Strategies,
edited by Ellen Altman and Peter Hernon
Reviewed by: Jeff White, 1334- Books, Bricks & Bytes: Libraries in the Twenty-First Century,
edited by Stephen R. Graubard and Paul LeClerc
Reviewed by: Janie L. Hassard Wilkins, 1336- The Virtual Workplace,
edited by Magid Igbaria and Margaret Tan
Reviewed by: James Sempsey, 1337- Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption,
by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau
Reviewed by: Thomas A. Peters, 1338