Relative effectiveness of titles, abstracts, and subject headings for machine retrieval from the COMPENDEX services
Jerry R. Byrne · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1975
Abstract We have investigated the relative merits of searching on titles, subject headings, abstracts, free‐language terms, and combinations of these elements. The COM‐ PENDEX data base was used for this study since it contained all of the data elements of interest. In general, the results obtained from the experiments indi‐ cate that, as expected, titles alone are not satisfactory for efficient retrieval. The combination of titles and abstracts came the closest to 100% retrieval, with searching of abstracts alone doing almost as well. Indexer input, although necessary for 100% retrieval in almost all cases, was found to be relatively unimportant.