MaryEllen C. Sievert

Indexing Consistency in "Information Science Abstracts."

Duplicate entries in Information Science Abstracts allowed for a study of the consistency of the indexing of this file. The results showed a bipolar distribution: indexing matched completely almost half of the time and did not match at all almost half of the time. The indexing policies of ISA require one mainheading and one or two subheadings per document. This restriction in the number of terms and the fact that ISA has a very small vocabulary from which to draw these terms may be the reason for this bipolar distribution. The indexing consistency was highest for the descriptors, drawn from a small controlled vocabulary, and lowest for identifiers, drawn from natural language or the controlled vocabulary. The data suggested that as the number of terms assigned per article increased indexing consistency decreased.

The Medline/full-text research project

This project was designed to test the relative efficacy of index terms and full-text for the retrieval of documents in those MEDLINE journals for which full-text searching was also available. The full-text files used were MEDIS from Mead Data Central and CCML from BRS Information Technologies. One hundred clinical medical topics were searched in these two files as well as the MEDLINE file to accumulate the necessary data. It was found that full-text identified significantly more relevant articles than did the indexed file, MEDLINE. The full-text searches, however, lacked the precision of searches done in the indexed file. Most relevant items missed in the full-text files, but identified in MEDLINE, were missed because the searcher failed to account for some aspect of natural language, used a logical or positional operator that was too restrictive, or included a concept which was implied, but not expressed in the natural language. Very few of the unique relevant full-text citations would have been retrieved by title or abstract alone. Finally, as of July, 1990 the more current issue of a journal was just as likely to appear in MEDLINE as in one of the full-text files.

An editor's influence on citation patterns: A case study of Elementary School Journal

An analysis of citation data of Elementary School Journal suggests that changes in editorship may have resulted in changes in citation patterns. This journal had three editors in a 10‐year period. The study examined the editorial goals of each of the editors and found that while they agreed on several positions, the current editor stressed research more and was interested in rapid communication. Citation data for 2 years after each editor had assumed control showed changes in the number of citations the journal received, the number of citations given, the immediacy index and the impact factor. The impact factor under the current editor had surpassed the 0.35 figure sometimes noted as signifying importance. Further the journals citing Elementary School Journal and those being cited in it had shifted and included those identified as important or prestigious in other, earlier studies. Finally, statistical tests on the impact factor and the immediacy index for nine years confirmed that the tenure of the third editor was significantly different from that of the first two editors. The shifts seen in all these data suggest that an editor who intends to change a journal may have an impact on the citation patterns of that publication.

Beyond Google: Finding and Evaluating Web-Based Information for Community-Based Nursing Practice

Nurses are challenged to find and use reliable, credible information to support clinical decision-making and to meet expectations for evidence-based nursing practice. This project targeted practicing public health and school nurses, teaching them how to access and critically evaluate web-based information resources for frontline practice. Health sciences librarians partnered with nursing faculty to develop two participatory workshops to teach skills in searching for and evaluating web-based consumer and professional practice resources. The first workshop reviewed reliable, credible consumer web-resources appropriate to use with clients, using published criteria to evaluate website credibility. In the second workshop, nurses were taught how to retrieve and evaluate health-related research from professional databases to support evidence-based nursing practice. Evaluation data indicated nurses most valued knowing about the array of reliable, credible web-based health information resources, learning how to evaluate website credibility, and understanding how to find and apply professional research literature to their own practice.

Value of Health Sciences Library Resources and Services to Health Care Providers in Medium and Large Communities Across Two Mid-Continental States

This article describes results from a survey of health care professionals in four hospitals serving medium (<300,000) and large (>300,000) communities in Colorado and Missouri about health sciences library information and services. Greater proportions of physicians than nurses or nonclinical respondents checked answers about the librarys value in patient care, confirming patient management decisions, changing of tests, or changing of therapy. Medical providers indicated that health sciences libraries were of value for a large variety of uses, including changing and confirming patient management decisions and reducing length of stay.

New Educational Strategies for Training Information Professionals: Building Awareness, Concepts, and Skills through Learning Technologies.

Libraries, Medical Informatics, and Health Care was an experimental distance-education course aimed at both health sciences and other librarians and graduate students. The course included three modalities for delivering instruction: a satellite broadcast, materials on the Internet, and an intensive seminar. The teleconference focused on two topics, consumer health care information and telemedicine and the relation of each to librarianship. The Internet-based materials covered the U.S. health care delivery system, the language of medicine, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), and MEDLINE. The intensive seminar covered other health sciences resources, the biomedical community, trends in health sciences librarianship, and medical informat-ics. Each modality presented opportunities and challenges to the instructional team and the students. Evaluations revealed that participants were generally favorable about the experience but that there were more problems with the Internet section of the course than with the other sections.

Ten years of the literature of online searching: An analysis of Online and Online Review

An analysis of data from the first decade of the publication of Online and Online Review revealed that while both cover the literature of online searching, they are very different. Editorial policies, subtitles, and editorial board memberships all indicate differing perspectives. Further, objective data, such as impact factors, immediacy indexes, and rankings within the category of information and library science, are statistically significantly different. Both the national and institutional affiliations of the authors publishing in the two journals also differed. And, an analysis of the titles showed each journal covering different topics within the field.

The Evaluation of a Drill and Practice Program for Online Retrieval.

The DAPPOR software, a drill and practice program for learning the command languages of major vendors of bibliographic data bases was tested in a classroom environment at two library schools. Statistically significant positive learning differences were observed with DAPPOR use, particularly with the DIALOG language. With the exception of undergraduate GPA in the case of DIALOG, demographic variables were not significant. Successful DAPPOR interaction does not require actual keyboarding; participation in intellectual formulation of the answers is sufficient. Cost was considerably lower than the use of vendors systems at educational rates and user response was generally positive.

Full-text databases in medicine

The wide variety of full‐text databases pertinent to medicine requires classification. The first distinction to be made is between those full‐text databases which are full‐text retrievable only and those which are both full‐text retrievable and full‐text searchable. The full‐text searchable files may be further divided into four major groups: 1) The electronic version of factual books or directories; 2) those which reproduce textbooks and reference books; 3) the hybrid—often mixtures of full‐text and bibliographic records; and 4) the full‐text of medical journal articles. The software for searching full‐text medical databases varies from vendor to vendor. More than 400 journal titles in full‐text were available as of April 1995 but no one system contained all the full‐text medical journal titles. Little research has been done on the efficacy of using full‐text databases in the biomedical arena. The MEDLINE/Full‐Text Project represents a multi‐year effort to learn about the heuristics for searching full‐text files of medical journal articles.

A text corpus approach to an analysis of the shared use of core terminology

We sought to investigate the shared use of core Ophthalmology terms in the domains of Ophthalmology, Family Practice and Radiology. A random sample of 450 terms was selected from the terms submitted as Ophthalmology terms in the NLM/AHCPR Large Scale Vocabulary Test. Two expert Ophthalmologists rated each term as Ophthalmic or non-Ophthalmic. When both raters agreed that a term was Ophthalmic, it was treated as a core Ophthalmology term for purposes of the study. We searched for the core terms in a text corpus of 38,695 MEDLINE abstracts covering 1970–1999 from journals representing the three domains of Ophthalmology, Radiology, and Family Practice. We compared proportions of abstracts from each domain for each term. We examined overlap of confidence intervals for proportions of abstracts for each core term and domain. Core Ophthalmology terms were used significantly more by Ophthalmology than by Radiology, or by Family Practice.