EXPERTISE AND STRATEGIES IN SCIENTIFIC DO CUMENTS INDEXING

Expertise and strategies in scientific documents indexing. This paper presents the results of a study of scientific documents indexing. Inde xing consists in identifying the main ideas of a document and in conve rting them into indexing terms chosen among a controlled vocabulary. I n the area of information sciences, several studies have shown an impo rtant variability among indexers. The characteristics shared by the in dexing and diagnostic tasks enable us to consider various indexing str ategies according to expertises, these strategies allowing us to expla in the variability among the indexing terms chosen. Twenty-five subjec ts have indexed eight books; they had to write the terms depicting the main ideas of documents using the indexing terms they extracted from the documentary language RAMEAU. Two categories of variables have been controlled: the textual content (two scientific fields: economics and psychology) and the operators' characteristics (expertise in indexing and in use of the documentary language RAMEAU and familiarity with th e scientific domain). The dependent variables are the number of indexi ng terms chosen, the rate of the intra-indexer consistency, the nature of indexing procedures, organisation of these procedures and, finally , the role of the level of expertise on the indexing strategies used. Results indicate three indexing strategies: ''indexing driven by the k nowledge of potential indexing terms'' ''indexing aided by the documen tary language'' ''indexing pointed at a user profile''. The first one was used by the professional indexers who practice the documentary lan guage RAMEAU; it's characterized by a search for indexing terms from t he document analysis stage. This search appears through a high rate of the intra-indexer consistency and through the objectives pursued. The se indexers carried out a level of analysis corresponding to the level required by the language RAMEAU. The second strategy was used by the beginner indexers; it consists in identifying the generic terms in the document that allow them to access quickly to the documentary languag e used then like a framework search. The use of this strategy goes wit h the lowest rate of similarity between concepts and indexing terms. T he third strategy was used by the professional indexers working with a nother documentary language. Their analysis was deeper; the subjects c hose a more important number of indexing terms and felt some difficult ies to convert concepts into indexing terms. These results raise quest ions about the compatibility between knowledge representation produce by the documentary languages and the operators' representation in orde r to elaborate new documentary language or to improve existing languag es.