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Index Term

Index terms capture the essence of a document's topic and make up a controlled vocabulary used in bibliographic records. They are keywords used to retrieve documents in information systems like catalogs or search engines. Index terms can consist of words, phrases, or alphanumeric terms and are created by analyzing documents manually or automatically. They are stored in search indexes to facilitate information retrieval.

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77 views2 pages

Index Term

Index terms capture the essence of a document's topic and make up a controlled vocabulary used in bibliographic records. They are keywords used to retrieve documents in information systems like catalogs or search engines. Index terms can consist of words, phrases, or alphanumeric terms and are created by analyzing documents manually or automatically. They are stored in search indexes to facilitate information retrieval.

Uploaded by

hasan jami
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© © All Rights Reserved
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5/21/23, 9:19 AM Index term - Wikipedia

Index term
In information retrieval, an index term (also known as subject term, subject heading,
descriptor, or keyword) is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms
make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic records. They are an integral part of
bibliographic control, which is the function by which libraries collect, organize and disseminate
documents. They are used as keywords to retrieve documents in an information system, for instance,
a catalog or a search engine. A popular form of keywords on the web are tags, which are directly
visible and can be assigned by non-experts. Index terms can consist of a word, phrase, or
alphanumerical term. They are created by analyzing the document either manually with subject
indexing or automatically with automatic indexing or more sophisticated methods of keyword
extraction. Index terms can either come from a controlled vocabulary or be freely assigned.

Keywords are stored in a search index. Common words like articles (a, an, the) and conjunctions (and,
or, but) are not treated as keywords because it's inefficient. Almost every English-language site on the
Internet has the article "the", and so it makes no sense to search for it. The most popular search
engine, Google removed stop words such as "the" and "a" from its indexes for several years, but then
re-introduced them, making certain types of precise search possible again.

The term "descriptor" was by Calvin Mooers in 1948. It is in particular used about a preferred term
from a thesaurus.

The Simple Knowledge Organization System language (SKOS) provides a way to express index terms
with Resource Description Framework for use in the context of the Semantic Web.[1]

In web search engines


Most web search engines are designed to search for words anywhere in a document—the title, the
body, and so on. This being the case, a keyword can be any term that exists within the document.
However, priority is given to words that occur in the title, words that recur numerous times, and
words that are explicitly assigned as keywords within the coding.[2] Index terms can be further refined
using Boolean operators such as "AND, OR, NOT." "AND" is normally unnecessary as most search
engines infer it. "OR" will search for results with one search term or another or both. "NOT"
eliminates a word or phrase from the search, getting rid of any results that include it. Multiple words
can also be enclosed in quotation marks to turn the individual index terms into a specific index
phrase. These modifiers and methods all help to refine search terms, to better maximize the accuracy
of search results.[3]

Author keywords
Author keywords are an integral part of literature.[1] Many journals and databases provide access to
index terms made by authors of the respective articles. How qualified the provider is decides the
quality of both indexer-provided index terms and author-provided index terms. The quality of these

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5/21/23, 9:19 AM Index term - Wikipedia

two types of index terms is of research interest, particularly in relation to information retrieval. In
general, an author will have difficulty providing indexing terms that characterize his or her document
relative to other documents in the database.

Examples
Canadian Subject Headings (CS)
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
Polythematic Structured Subject Heading System (PSH)
Subject Headings Authority File (SWD)

See also
Index (publishing)
Keyword density
Subject (documents)
Tag (metadata)
Tag cloud

References
1. Svenonius, Elaine (2009). The intellectual foundation of information organization (1st MIT Press
pbk. ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262512619.
2. Cutts, Matt. (2010, March 4). How search works. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=BNHR6IQJGZs
3. CLIO. Keyword search. Columbia University Libraries. Retrieved from
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/help/clio/keyword.html

Further reading
Ferris, Anna M. (2018). "Birth of a Subject Heading" (https://doi.org/10.5860%2Flrts.62n1.16).
Library Resources & Technical Services. 62 (1): 16–27. doi:10.5860/lrts.62n1.16 (https://doi.org/1
0.5860%2Flrts.62n1.16).

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