Fundamental Problems of Literature searching. 2nd Report

A comparative study of indexes of abstracting journals in various countries

Abstract

Among many factors involved in making the literature searching rational, indexes play a specially important role. Indexes available as library tools, however, are far from satisfaction. Even the indexes of particular abstracting journals show the lack of satisfactory coverage.
In this paper, the writer tries to pick up a certain number of articles and show how they are represented by subject-headings in subject indexes of three Japanese and two foreign abstracting journals. To make a comperative study, contents of each article are analysed and searched in the indexes afore mentioned to see under what subjects they are indexed.
The recognition of gaps shown in examples though very limited in number urges us to tackle the problem by means of thorough understanding of documentation technique.