The traditional role of the controlled vocabulary has been to bring together items scattered by a multiplicity of natural language terms. Therefore, it was considered a recall device. The file structure of current online structure systems now leads to the use of such vocabularies as a precision device. Because of the levels of specificity in the controlled vocabulary, the search for broader concepts means several terms may be ncessary. In this case, the file structure of the retrieval systems requires that for efficient searching the entry points be analyzed and minimized. Complete, rather than partial, entry of controlled terms appears to be inefficient.
The Brillouin measure of an author's importance to a subject literature relates closely to that author's total contribution to the literature. Synthetic authors (those with negative entropy) are generally highly cited but citation ranking does not correlate well with synthetic strength. Synthetic authors do not concentrate in highly productive journals. The analysis is based on a 40‐year bibliography of the psychological phenomenon of extinction containing 894 distinct authors and 877 items.
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