The structure of relationally indexed titles and abstracts

Farradane's system of relational indexing has been used to index abstracts in several, mainly scientific subject areas, and provides two-dimensional displays of concepts and explicit relations. Ten of these collections have been examined to compare (a) the use of relations, (b) the use of concept types, (c) the cross sections (or shape) of abstracts, and (d) the properties of “nodes”. Whilst differences between the collections were noted in several instances, there were no obvious correlations between these differences. However, some points arose which could warrant more detailed study with larger collections.