Describes a study that collected statistics on the occurrence of terms used in searching an online catalog and investigated the correlation of the selection of terms with their occurrence in indexing. The discussion of the results includes implications for indexing theories. (19 references) (CLB)

Describes a study that was conducted to model the navigation patterns followed by users when retrieving information in hypertext systems. The development of two frequency distribution models is explained, the influence of search tasks on path patterns is discussed, and further research is described. (Contains 17 references.) (LRW)

Summarizes the findings of a recent study on the indexing practices used in the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database. Descriptors, or indexing terms, from the thesaurus are analyzed; searching implications are discussed; and the relationship between the classification code and the descriptors is examined. (Contains 21…

Reports algorithm for calculation of term discrimination values that is sufficiently fast in operation to permit use of exact values. Evidence is presented to show that relationship between term discrimination and term frequency is crucially dependent upon type of inter-document similarity measure used for calculation of discrimination values. (13…

Zipfian laws for frequency distributions of word pairs and longer phrases are derived from text sample analysis. From crossing of Zipfian curves, it is deduced that number of multi-word phrases that occur frequently in text is surprisingly small, of same order of magnitude as number of individual word-types. (8 references) (EJS)