What does BIOSIS mean by Key Terms, Variants, Classifiers, and Modifiers?
The indexer’s task is to represent the central concepts and content of each article, book, or other source item as an indexing record built of a set of Key Terms, each of which may have associated with it Variant Terms, one or two Classifiers, and Modifier. These structural elements may constitute a sentence. The Key Term is the subject or focus of the indexing sentence and a Variant captures synonyms of the Key Term. If the Key Term has no synonyms, the sentence has no Variant Term(s) in it. Classifiers are sets of controlled terms that provide some important “world view” of the Key Term that has particular relevance for life scientists. Finally, Modifiers are logical terms that extend the meaning of the Key Terms. While BIOSIS has some controlled-term lists for Modifiers, many Modifiers are natural-language terms indexed directly from the source documents. • What is the difference between BIOSIS Previews, Medline and EMBASE Coverage analysis indicates that BIOSIS Previews, Medline, a
The indexer’s task is to represent the central concepts and content of each article, book, or other source item as an indexing record built of a set of Key Terms, each of which may have associated with it Variant Terms, one or two Classifiers, and Modifier. These structural elements may constitute a sentence. The Key Term is the subject or focus of the indexing sentence and a Variant captures synonyms of the Key Term. If the Key Term has no synonyms, the sentence has no Variant Term(s) in it. Classifiers are sets of controlled terms that provide some important “world view” of the Key Term that has particular relevance for life scientists. Finally, Modifiers are logical terms that extend the meaning of the Key Terms. While BIOSIS has some controlled-term lists for Modifiers, many Modifiers are natural-language terms indexed directly from the source documents.
