letter to the editor (reply): incremental benefit of human indexing

Letter to the Editor (Reply)

Incremental Benefit of Human Indexing

Sir:In response to Dr. Humphrey’s comments (Humphrey, 2000), I

find it necessary to clarify that the article (Humphery, 1987) I wasreferring to in my paper (Qin, 2000) is indeed the correct one, butthe context was made less than clear, which I take full responsi-bility. The passage in question states two different but relatedmeanings in the context of that paragraph. The first one, “Morerecent research on indexing vocabularies in the context ofMEDLINE. . .,” was intended to mean the performance of free-textand controlled vocabulary in representing the same concepts ordocuments regardless of the human indexer’s role. While difficul-ties exist in evaluating the performance of both controlled andnatural language in representing concepts, Humphrey (1987) dem-onstrates how a knowledge-based indexing system can aid humanindexing using MeSH in the indexing process, so that human errorsand inconsistencies can be minimized. The second meaning isabout the use of search performance in measuring the performanceof controlled and natural language in representing document con-cepts. My citation to Hersh and Hickam (1995) merely states thefact and their opinion, and it would not be appropriate for me tojudge whether or not the 10% benefit reflects a significant increasein searching performance. Though it was not my intent in my paperto discuss to what extent an increment in search performance canbe considered as significant, the addition of Humphrey’s (1996)correspondence would have given audience a balanced view on the

contribution of controlled vocabulary to the improvement ofsearch performance.

Jian QinSchool of Information Studies,4-232 Center for Science and Technology,Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244E-mail: jqin@syr.edu

References

Hersh, W.R. & Hickam, D. (1995). Information retrieval in medicine: TheSAPHIRE experience. Journal of the American Society for InformationScience, 46,743–747.

Humphrey, S.M. (2000) Letter to the editor. Journal of the AmericanSociety for Information Science, 51, 582.

Humphrey, S.M. (1997). Knowledge-based indexing of the medical liter-ature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 38,184–196.

Humphrey, S.M. (1996) Letter to the editor. Journal of the AmericanSociety for Information Science, 47, 407–408. Published erratum ap-pears in Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1996,47, 584, stating that the letter should have been titled, “Retrieval inmedicine and human indexing.”

Qin, J. (2000). Semantic similarities between a keyword database and acontrolled vocabulary database: An investigation in the antibiotic resis-tance literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Sci-ence, 51, 166–180.

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE. 51(10):968, 2000