M. Carl Drott

Reexamining the role of conference papers in scholarly communication

In the most widely accepted model of the growth of scientific literature, papers presented at conferences are seen as precursors leading to the creation of journal articles. A sample of papers presented at an annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science led to journal articles at a rate much lower than would be expected from studies of other disciplines. On the other hand, a sample of articles from the Journal of the Americal Society for Information Science had rates of follow‐up publication similar to values reported in the literature. This suggests that it is not the case that information science as a discipline has different publication patterns from other scholarly areas. A more complex model of the growth of scientific literature is proposed. Among the features of this model are recognition that many new findings can be conveyed with relatively small amounts of information. A view that in complex systems novelty may not be as important as generalizability. And the emergence of new forms of dissemination including electronic communication, self‐publishing, and “group monographs.”

Using Web server logs to improve site design

Many web page designers may be unaware that web servers record transaction information each time they send a file to a browser. Others may know that a server log exists but they may see it only as a source of general statistical information such as site use distributed over time or counts of the number of times that each page was served. This paper describes how server logs can be used to give designers a much more detailed view of how users are accessing their site. Server logs can be used to monitor use patterns and employ them to improve the design and functionality of the web site. Web log data has been used to analyze and redesign a wide range of webbased material, including: online tutorials, databases, fact sheets, and reference material.

An Empirical Examination of Bradford's Law and the Scattering of Scientific Literature.

Twenty‐three data sets representing the documents retrieved by a wide variety of searches were examined for correspondence to Bradfords Law. Regression lines fit to the data sets showed all correlations in excess of 0.96. Thus, the fitted line, as customarily specified by slope and intercept, can serve as a good representation of an entire data set. Slope can be shown to be almost entirely determined by the total number of articles retrieved. Over two‐thirds of the variance in the intercept is accounted for by the total number of journal titles retrieved. These findings weigh against earlier speculation that slope and intercept depended on such characteristics as breadth of subject area, topic, time period, or search technique. The findings show that Bradfords Law is the reflection of some underlying process not related to the characteristics of the search mechanism or the nature of the literature. The authors conclude that there is instead a basic probabilistic mechanism underlying the law.

A thesaurus for end-user indexing and retrieval

Abstract Direct end-user data entry and retrieval is a major factor in achieving an economical information retrieval system. To be effective, such a system would have to provide a thesaurus structure which leads novice end-users to browse subject areas before retrieval and yet provides control and coverage of terms in a domain. A faceted hierarchical thesaurus organization has been designed to accomplish this goal.

Test of methods for evaluating bibliographic databases: an analysis of the National Library of Medicine's handling of literatures in the medical behavioral sciences

This article reports on five separate studies designed for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to develop and test methodologies for evaluating the products of large databases. The methodologies were tested on literatures of the medical behavioral sciences (MBS). One of these studies examined how well NLM covered MBS monographic literature using CATLINE and OCLC. Another examined MBS journal and serial literature coverage in MEDLINE and other MBS‐related databases available through DIALOG. These two studies used 1010 items derived from the reference lists of sixty‐one journals, and tested for gaps and overlaps in coverage in the various databases. A third study examined the quality of the indexing NLM provides to MBS literatures and developed a measure of indexing as a system component. The final two studies explored how well MEDLINE retrieved documents on topics submitted by MBS professionals and how online searchers viewed MEDLINE (and other systems and databases) in handling MBS topics. The five studies yielded both broad research outcomes and specific recommendations to NLM.

A system for classification and control of information in the computer aided cooperative work place

consistency in the use of terms identifying measurements and test results, provision of fields which disclose and date stamp possibly patentable ideas, and indexing information which links this report to other reports. In our system design the responsibility for these aspects of the report are shared by engineers who are members of the research team, clerical support staff, and the research project manager. In addition, the computer participates in the description of the report by analyzing document content in comparison to other documents and to a concept network. Further, the completion of a report calls for updating project progress information, communication with other work groups to plan future directions, and perhaps reassignment of personnel and resources. In addition to the documentation materials provided by the engineer-users of the CACW, part of the documentation is generated automatically by a series of programs. The computer performs its analysis through the development and updating of a “concept network.” It first processes the document to identify key words and phrases. Parsing approaches and syntactic analysis were not used both because of their high implementation cost and because of their demands on machine time. The selection of terms draws upon a knowledge structure to which all previous reports in the information system have contributed, The concept network establishes weighted links between report words and and concepts. This linkage in turn links to additional concepts and to reports linked to them. The material from the outside vendor is also processed, although since most of the information is in the form of abstracts only, the procedure is somewhat different Documenting Dynamic Information In our test environment many of the information linkage tasks are handled by computer (although at present some subsystems exist only as simulations.) One of our first goals was the automatic linking of items in the technical information library. Previous research had shown us that to be able to produce such linkage, we needed information about the topics and contents of the articles and reports from the engineers who were actually creating and using them. on the other hand, we found that traditional indexing structures were too complex for the engineers to learn and master given the time available for this aspect of the system. In response to this we developed a classification display system that gave the users choices in a tree structured display. Two of our goals here were to have a shallow tree structure so that the number of choices which had to be made with respect to any particular concept was small and to permit the user create a new entry into the tree at any point. Thus the tree display is a representation of the concept network in which the choices of each user can be individualized and are not required to be consistent with the current concept network. This approach was intended to overcome user resistance to being forced to learn and operate within a traditional indexing structure. It also preserves the cooperative nature of the system since a set of relationships among ideas may represent a single individual, a specific project group, or the entire work group. An important force for encouraging individual effort in the classification of reports proved to be the project supervisors. They viewed the technical data base as a communications tool. One supervisor described it as an “ultimate routing system. ” “It puts in what people will ask for before they ask it. ” Another engineer said that the selection of terms was like describing an elephant. “I don’t know all the right words to put in but but the machine makes it a whole picture rather than than just a blind man who knows only part of the animal.” The original documentation for the information retrieval system ‘was organized around the online display of the hierarchies of terms. This is the same display that formed the search and retrieval system which included basis for the description of new reports and for the selection of search terms for retrieval. The user had the choice of seeing the tree augmented by his own terms or in standard form. Searching consisted of browsing the tree and selecting one or more points to form a query. Boolean searching was also available. Contrary to some reports in the literature that users are confused by boolean searching, the engineers using the system seemed to have no problems. Anecdotal evidence suggests that users tended to browse briefly in the display and then formulate a boolean search. Thk may in part stem from the limited number of terms that can be displayed on any one screen. It may have seemed faster to type more terms rather than to page through a lengthy display. Overall the search documentation seemed to be little used at least in part because the system was easily learned and straightforward. Documenting Definitions One of the surprises to emerge from our information system for research engineers was the need to provide definitions of terms. As noted above, when reports were put into the data base they included special descriptors describing specific tests or measurements that they reported. Upon implementation this aspect drew criticism that “other engineers” were using the terms inappropriately. As we investigated the situation, we found that there was a lack of agreement as to what many terms meant. Thk problem with nomenclature is not a new phenomenon to electronics. Even references to published standards such as “RS 232 interface” are widely understood by engineers to mean that only part of the specific interface standard may have been followed. In many engineering situations the universities which train the engineers are great forces for standardization, both through widely used texts and through the professional contacts of the faculty who do research in the fields. For our present case, some of the technology was so