SEGÚN EL OBJETIVO ESPECIFICO 3: PONER LINEAMIENTOS

This thesis is structured to consider the deficiency of Arabic periodical indexing and the solution to this problem. It consists of three parts.

The first part contains three chapters and provides a thorough and comprehensive introduction to the issue of Arabic periodical indexing and the hurdles to the objectives of the printed Arabic periodical indexes to be current and up-to-date indexing tools. It also intends to give a general overview of title keyw ord indexing and the ways in which the various types of title-derivative printed indexes aie produced.

The second chapter of part one represents a state of the art report for Arabic indexing and Arabic printed indexes. It casts light on the history of Arabic periodical indexing and surveys the indexing products including the printed indexes which have ceased publication as well as the current ones. It concentrates on the current Arabic periodical indexes to show their deficiency and inadequacy in covering the contents of Arabic periodical articles and reveals the reasons behind this deficiency to conclude that a new indexing system is now needed.

The third chapter of part one defines the proposed title-derivative indexing techniques and reviews their history before and after the emergence of the com puter as an indexing tool. It also reviews the various types of derived printed indexes and the way they are produced. In addition to that, it reveals the functions of article titles and their various use in the different types of Arabic bibliographical tools. It discusses the available literature for both W estern and Arab authors with regard to title construction for their

articles, and ends with a condensed review of what has been said about the advantages and drawbacks of title keyword indexing techniques.

Part two of this thesis also consists of three chapters. It aims to provide the answer to the issue of the informativeness and representativeness of Arabic article titles. Since the proposed indexing m ethod depends on keywords found in titles of Arabic articles, the quality of such printed indexes relies to a great extent on how well the titles of Arabic periodical articles are constructed by their authors. Three consecutive chapters are devoted to investigating the informativeness and representativeness of Arabic article titles. Informativeness is different from representativeness and informative titles may not be representative, a difference that was not noticed in many of the previous studies which dealt with the relevance of article titles for indexing.

Chapter four of this thesis is devoted to the study of the information content of titles of Arabic periodical articles and aims to find out how well Arab authors compose the titles for their articles in terms of the number of informative words. It determines the average length of Arabic article titles and the number of substantive words they include in contrast with the number of non substantive words in 16 various fields. A sim ilar study o f the information content of English article titles was carried out for the purpose of comparison. English periodical articles have already been investigated and claimed to be informative according to previous studies.

Chapter five of this thesis is the first of two chapters devoted to the study of the titles' representation of their accom panying articles. To investigate the similarities between keywords used by authors in their article titles and by indexers in their subject headings, it examines the matching between the content of titles of Arabic articles and the contents of the

indexer-assigned subject headings for the same articles in 10 various fields taken from al-Fihrist (cj-uuj^U I) index. Another objective for this chapter is to determine the average number of subject headings assigned to Arabic articles and compare it with the average number of access points (keywords) found in the titles of the same Arabic articles.

Chapter six is also devoted to the examination of titles' representation of their accompanying articles. To overcome the criticism of the previous titles' representation study in chapter five, this chapter tries to follow a completely different approach. For this, it assumes that authors normally express the subject of their articles in what is known as the " topic sentence ", often found in the " introduction " or " objectives " parts of an article. This chapter matches the keywords found in titles and the keywords found in the topic sentences manually extracted from the selected articles. It starts with defining the expression " topic sentence " and the boundaiies of its use as well as reviewing its previous usage in the libraiy and information science literature. Then the matching process is carried out with attention to other aspects that may affect the results and the chapter ends with a conclusion to the whole process.

The last part of the thesis also consists of three chapters. This part represents the practical side of the research, and like previous parts it includes studies and reveals facts regarding the Arabic title-derivative indexing, which have not been mentioned before. Chapter seven is devoted to revealing the problem s involved in the process of using keywords of Arabic titles to generate automatic printed indexes, and to studying the user reactions to such types of Arabic printed indexes in contrast with that of conventional indexes. For this, the chapter describes the process of producing two different types of Arabic printed indexes. The first is a title-derivative printed index and the

latter is a conventional index to the same articles. These two types are then shown to a number of Arab users in a process to study the retrieval efficiency of the first in com parison to the conventional index. In this chapter, consideration is given to the Arabization activities for computer programs and the use of Arabized computer packages in librarianship and information work in the Arab institutions inside and outside the Arab countries.

Chapter eight is allocated to the study of the characteristics of the Arabic language and the problem s involved if users depend on Arabic title-derivative printed indexes to search for their required articles. It provides some suggestions in this domain.

The final chapter is devoted to the conclusion of the research and includes some recommendations to authors and publishers regarding the construction of titles of Arabic periodical articles.

Chapter two

Arabic literature indexing and Arabic periodical printed indexes

This chapter considers the state of the art o f the current Arabic periodical indexing as well as printed indexes for the contents of Arabic periodical articles. It reviews the history of indexing activities in the Arab world and discusses the validity and sufficiency of current Arabic indexing techniques in covering and analysing the contents of academic and research periodical articles.