Consistência na indexação em Bibliotecas Universitárias de Enfermagem-Saúde em Portugal

Abstract

In areas such as health, the number of scientific publications is increasing due to the exponential advancement of science. These publications have the role of disseminating knowledge, which has an essential role in higher education institutions, such as nursing schools, both as research and investigations centres, and as responsible for the updated and multidisciplinary way health professionals are able to demonstrate an informed and validated practice. That’s where indexing has its fundamental role, justifying from knowing better the contribution of university libraries in access to information and documentation. For this purpose, this study aims to measure the consistency of indexing in libraries of nursing/ public health schools existing in Portugal. It was set to sample all nursing/public health schools (N = 21), which were examined in two different times. To proceed to the study of the indexing process an investigation was used. For the measurement of the consistency of indexing, we use the selection in their document databases and a document book of regular publication in the whole sample, comparing the terms used by different university libraries for the indexing of the same document. The results obtained with regard to indexing consistency were of 21.1% for periodic publication and 18.9% for the book, which in its totality makes a consistency of 20.9% allocated to libraries, a value we consider low, but that goes against the studies analyzed by Zunde and Dexter (1969) which highlight values between 10% to 80%, depending on these parameters on which indexing is performed and the consistency measure is used. With regard to the study of the indexing process, all hypotheses were rejected, so we can see that our dependent variable -consistency of indexing - does not change with factors such as training, document type, years of experience as an indexer, which opens other research paths, in order to find appropriate procedures for the increased consistency checked in this study.

Date of Award	27 Jul 2012
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Ana Meireles Sousa Pires (Supervisor) & Aida Pires Branco Alves (Co-Supervisor)