Comparison of User-generated Tags with Subject Descriptors, Author Keywords, and Title Terms of Scholarly Journal Articles: A Case Study of Marine Science

Abstract

Information retrieval is the challenge of the Web 2.0 world. The experiment of knowledge organisation in the context of abundant information available from various sources proves a major hurdle in obtaining information retrieval with greater precision and recall. The fast-changing landscape of information organisation through social networking sites at a personal level creates a world of opportunities for data scientists and also library professionals to assimilate the social data with expert created data. Thus, folksonomies or social tags play a vital role in information organisation and retrieval. The comparison of these user-created tags with expert-created index terms, author keywords and title words, will throw light on the differentiation between these sets of data. Such comparative studies show revelation of a new set of terms to enhance subject access and reflect the extent of similarity between user-generated tags and other set of terms. The CiteULike tags extracted from 5,150 scholarly journal articles in marine science were compared with corresponding Aquatic Science and Fisheries Abstracts descriptors, author keywords, and title terms. The Jaccard similarity coefficient method was employed to compare the social tags with the above mentioned wordsets, and results proved the presence of user-generated keywords in Aquatic Science and Fisheries Abstracts descriptors, author keywords, and title words. While using information retrieval techniques like stemmer and lemmatization, the results were found to enhance keywords to subject access.