engleski

Who Needs Controlled Vocabularies When We Have Keywords & Free Text Searching?

Aim of this paper is to compare keyword searching in Hrčak: Portal of Croatian scientific and professional journals and subject searching in library catalogues. Methods used in this research include content analysis and comparison. Chosen research topics are abortion and homosexuality (including all keywords closely connected to those terms). Analysis of Author’s guidelines from 54 journals will give an overview of what is expected from authors on how to approach the keywords creation task. The field of Biomedicine and Healthcare were chosen because it was noticed that some (almost all) journals either suggest or ‘prescribe’ usage of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Index Medicus for keywords). Usually, authors themselves choose around six keywords which best describe topics of their article. Also, sometimes authors have to choose keywords from the existing list (e.g. MeSH). Keywords are usually not controlled but it would help if they are connected, at least making possible to collocate similar subject areas. On the other hand, subject headings are controlled and often not understandable to regular users. There is a need for controlled vocabularies in the catalogues, since keyword searching retrieves only part of results when there are no subject headings included. Research showed that keywords provided by authors have an important presence in database descriptors. It is a great challenge to find satisfactory solutions which will provide the best possible search results for both users of Hrčak and library catalogues. In order to give more reliable resources and attract more (happy and satisfied) users, the Editorial Board of Hrčak Portal should rethink Hrčak’s indexing and search options. There is always an option of a free text searching, but the results of that usually end up with more results and more (un)useful results. On the other hand, journals should think wheatear they should employ professionals to deal with keywords (i.e. information scientists) or introduce controlled vocabulary (thesaurus, subject heading lists) for indexing their articles in order to enhance recall of the more relevant results through existing search options.

keywords searching ; authors' guidelines analysis ; indexing journals in Hrčak

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