DOCTORAL ABSTRACT

Verification of bibliometric methods’ applicability
for thesaurus construction
Jesper W. Schneider
Department of Information Studies
Royal School of Library and Information Sciencejws@db.dk
Available at http://biblis.db.dk/uhtbin/hyperion.exe/db.jessch04
356p plus Appendix. ISBM: 87-7415-286-6
The doctoral dissertation work concerns the development and exploration of a semi-automaticthesaurus construction approach based on bibliometric methods.
The main objective of the dissertation is to reintroduce, and further extend, the theoretical andmethodological aspects of bibliometric methods to the research area of knowledge organization for thepurpose of semi-automatic thesaurus construction.
Thesaurus construction approaches are typically separated into manual approaches and automaticapproaches. Albeit, some form of manual thesaurus construction is mandatory due to the relationalcomplexities, semantic ambiguities, and dynamics, inherent in languages. Manual construction andmaintenance are complex and time consuming. It is therefore beneficial and necessary to combine
manual approaches with automatic approaches due to the complementarity of the two approaches (e.g.,Soergel, 1974; Anderson & Pérez-Caraballo, 2001a; 2001b). When automatic approaches are used as atool for thesaurus constructers, and not as a mean in itself, then we speak of semi-automatic thesaurus
construction (Soergel, 1974). This is the foundation for the approach explored in the present dissertation.
In order to pursue the main objective of semi-automatic thesaurus construction, a proposed
bibliometric -based methodology of five components is explored as a supplement to manual intellectual
thesaurus construction. The methodology is used as a framework for the investigation of the ability ofbibliometric methods to identify candidate thesaurus terms and thesaural relationships, as well as tomonitor potential terminological and conceptual changes within a specialty area. The bibliometricmethods investigated include document co-citation analysis, citation context analysis, co-word analysis,
and bibliometric ageing methods. The methodology is explored in a case study of periodontology, aspecialty area within dentistry.
The main contributions of the dissertation work are 1) an overall verification of the applicabilityof co-citation analysis, citation context analysis, and co-word analysis for semi-automatic thesaurus
construction; 2) demonstration of the ability of co-citation analysis and citation context analysis tospecifically identify important candidate thesaurus terms among a number of potential noun phrases, suchterms are important because they are contextual and agreed upon in the scientific community; and 3)
demonstration of the ability of co-citation analysis and co-word analysis to detect thesaural relationships

ACM SIGIR Forum63

Vol. 39 No. 1 June 2005

between terms that do not, or rarely, co-occur directly with each other in citation contexts. These results
are a direct consequence of the applied bibliometric based methodology.
Consequently, the research reported on in the present doctoral dissertation is a contribution to thedevelopment of ‘automatic methods’ as tools for manual intellectual thesaurus construction.
References
Anderson, J. D. and Pérez-Carballo, J. (2001a). The nature of indexing: how humans andmachines analyze messages and texts for retrieval. Part I: Research, and the nature of human indexing.
Information Processing and Management, 37(2), 231-254.
Anderson, J. D. and Pérez-Carballo, J. (2001b). The nature of indexing: how humans andmachines analyze messages and texts for retrieval. Part II: Machined indexing, and the allocation ofhuman versus machine effort. Information Processing and Management, 37(2), 255-277.
Soergel, D. (1974). Indexing languages and thesauri: construction and maintenance. Los Angeles,CA: Melville.

ACM SIGIR Forum64

Vol. 39 No. 1 June 2005