Abstract

Helle Lauridsen
CSA, Oxford, UK

How researchers use the electronic library?

A full-text search will retrieve records based on text in the captions of figures and tables, but not text which is part of a figure or table image (i.e. tables not constructed with HTML tagging). More importantly, full-text searches cannot be limited to figure or table captions (i.e. cannot be used to create targeted searches). As a result, a full-text search for "oxygen uptake" will identify a huge number of irrelevant, or at least general, articles because the search is looking at words anywhere in the full text, even the cited references. If you want to ensure that the research reflected in a publication actually focussed on "oxygen uptake", a full-text search would be of minimal value. Moreover, if "oxygen uptake" was only displayed within a figure within an axis caption, the full-text search would miss those articles, which by definition, are exactly the articles you need.
Making these objects visible by indexing each table & figure, makes an extremely valuable research tool to focus literature searches focused with greatly increased accuracy, it allows researchers to draw connections between disparate subjects, identifying avenues of new research rather than simply providing answers and as a side benefit… the index facilitates the collection of figures and tables that could be used in reports and presentations, a bonus for teachers and undergraduates

In the new way of searching in tables and figures, each table and figure extracted from a journal article is assigned index terms as appropriate for the type of table or figure (photograph, histogram, map, etc.) subject indexing, geographic indexing, taxonomic indexing, statistical indexing and other relevant data using an automated indexing system. All tables and figures in an article are fully indexed and can be searched separately. A combined “enhanced abstract” display shows all of the tables and figures within a single article along with bibliographic, full indexing, and abstracts for the article. These enhanced abstract articles can be linked to the electronic journal collection of a library. Tables and figures are displayed within the deep indexing system as thumbnails, most of which can be displayed in an enlarged format.