Difference between revisions of "Bibliographic/OOoBib Functional Requirements/Keywords"

Revision as of 15:45, 12 July 2006

This document has been placed on the wiki so that members of the OpenOffice community can assist in developing the design and documentation for the enhanced bibliographic facility.

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Keywords

One way to better sort articles is based on Keywords (see my post on keywords).

However, there is another way I will shortly describe here.

There are a number of categories a research paper can belong to:

• Basic Research
• Theoretical Research (especially in Math/Physics)
• Modeling
• Trials:
  • randomized controlled trial
  • Meta-analysis
  • other trial
• Review
• Guideline
• Correspondence
• Editorial
• Epidemiologic Study
• Case Report
• Images in clinical medicine (some Journals have such a feature/ could be a subgroup of Case Report)
• Questions/ Question-Answers

If there are other relevant categories, feel free to implement them as well.

This is especially useful when searching for all trials on a given matter (e.g. for writing a meta-analysis or writing a review or a guideline), or for a specific case report.

I do have some >2500 of articles saved on my computer and searching for the correct file is a nightmare. It may seem that 2500 articles is a huge number, however in infections diseases this is only a minimum to start with.

It is useful to have a field storing this information. Although custom fields exist, this is a feature that should be standard. It allows searching (and grouping) articles on a more powerful basis.

Submitted as issue number 66353 by discoleo at Openoffice.org.

Implementation ideas

How should this be implemented ? Most bib and document systems I have seem to think that adding a field for keywords is enough and let the user the invent their own categories. I have been involved in IT development and document management systems and have had enough lectures from librarians (ie professional indexers) to know that this just leads to a big unmanageable mess, which librarians are often called in to try to fix.

Also a good keyword system has a good set of aliases defined. One insurance company was providing different compensation for fractured limbs than for broken limbs, because their compensation history search system did not have these aliases defined. The cases and the compensation history diverged as each of the staff used their preferred term.

So --- Should we build pre-defined document category sets that a user could select one for each document collection. i.e. Medical Research, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences etc ? David Wilson

Discussion

After a thorough thought, I believe more and more, that a standardization is both highly useful and needed.

I wish to discuss 2 points:

* how to standardize
* how to implement the standardization

How to standardize

This is a huge task and, because there is no standardization to date, I belive there is a reason. Therefore, before starting from scratch, it would be wise to search for work already done:

• search for standards
• contact librarians, other groups
• contact others who might be interested or have done work in this field (e.g. I could try to contact the stuff from Pubmed)

How to implement this

In order to be used in practice, the end-user needs to be served everything already done. Therefore, the program MUST already suggest some appropriate categories. This could be more easily accomplished for major article category, but for more detailed keywords it will become increasingly difficult. (YES, I believe that even the keywords should be standardized, ... maybe sometime in the future.)

Specific procedure:

• scan journal title: jounals publish in most instances only articles from very specific fields (except maybe Nature and Science)
• scan title and abstract for some standard words
• depending on the words found, propose to the user an article category/ subcategory: e.g. medicine/ surgery/ randomized controlled trial

I will continue in the next section with a more thorough discussion of this implementation.

Requirements

Keywords

• alias: synonym of a specific word, i.e., the 2 words can be interchanged in a specific context
• 'hierarchical node': the presence of one term implies automatically another term, although the 2 are not aliases/synonyms, e.g. endocarditis implies infection, bacteremia, heart valves and medicine, too. Another non-medical example: whale implies both mammal and ocean (or water), but mammal does not imply whale.

Journal Classification

• basic categories: We will need to define basic categories (at the top of the hierarchy); every article belongs to one (or more) of these basic categories
• list of journals
• basic category for journals: we will need to apply one or more categories to every journal.

Top Categories

Question: Do we need subcategories OR, more specifically, how do we define subcategories?

• mathematics
• physics
  • quantum mechanics (these would be subcategories, ... or still main categories)
  • astrophysics
  • others
• biomedical sciences
  • internal medicine
    • many subspecialities
  • surgery
    • many subspecialities
  • infectious diseases
    • microbiology (could be one hierarchical node higher)
    • virology
    • parasitology
    • tropical medicine
    • epidemiology
  • microbiology (could be subspeciality of infectious diseases)
  • cognitive sciences
• biology

Feel free to expand this list!!!