图书馆学实验方法研究

<正> 一、基本概念"实验"可以定义为研究者对起重要作用的条件加以精确地说明和控制的一种研究方式.改变一个或多个自变量的值,观察这种变化对于一个或多个实验组的各个因变量值的影响.而其它可能与研究课题有关的(即影响因变量的值)因素,则通过精密的实验将其限制在最小程度.这样,通过控制实验的条件,研究假设的基本要求就得到满足.在图书馆学方面,实验方法可以用于鉴定那些有关图书馆藏书建设,藏书保管和藏书利用等方面的新技术,说明那些定义不准     

An SDILINE profile oriented to patient care.

Hospital physicians naturally require current medical information in order to treat their patients. An objectively obtained SDILINE storesearch was devised to obtain this information. A rank-ordered list of hospital discharge diagnoses, coded with ICDA terms, was translated into MeSH. The top two Bradford zones of journals defined as useful at the University of Missouri--Kansas City were ANDed to these MeSH terms. Citations retrieved from the storesearch are input into an in-house computerized data base. The method can be easily used by other medical or hospital libraries without access to computers.     

Indexing consistency in MEDLINE

The quality of indexing of periodicals in a bibliographic data base cannot be measured directly, as there is no one "correct" way to index an item. However, consistency can be used to measure the reliability of indexing. To measure consistency in MEDLINE, 760 twice-indexed articles from 42 periodical issues were identified in the data base, and their indexing compared. Consistency, expressed as a percentage, was measured using Hooper's equation. Overall, checktags had the highest consistency. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and subheadings were applied more consistently to central concepts than to peripheral points. When subheadings were added to a main heading, consistency was lowered. "Floating" subheadings were more consistent than were attached subheadings. Indexing consistency was not affected by journal indexing priority, language, or length of the article. Terms from MeSH Tree Structure categories A, B, and D appeared more often than expected in the high-consistency articles; whereas terms from categories E, F, H, and N appeared more often than expected in the low-consistency articles. MEDLINE, with its excellent controlled vocabulary, exemplary quality control, and highly trained indexers, probably represents the state of the art in manually indexed data bases.