A Comparative Evaluation Of The Thesaurus Of Engineering And Scientific Terms And The Ddc Retrieval And Indexing Terminology

A comparative evaluation has been undertaken on the DDC Retrieval and Indexing Terminology (DRIT) and the Thesaurus of Engineering and Scientific Terms (TEST). The study examined the hierarchic structure of both thesauri and their lead in terminologies, and the specificity of terms in each thesaurus was compared. A comparison was made of the index terms assigned to a number of abstracts, using each thesaurus, and these terms were also compared with free language terms assigned by the ASSASSIN computer program. It was found that TEST, with its greater number of preferred terms, was the more specific indexing terminology, but DRIT gave the better guide to the selection of a preferred term by virtue of its larger number of lead in terms.