Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms

The Development of the PsycINFO Thesaurus

Psychological Abstracts (PA) was founded as a printed bibliography in 1927. The classification and indexing system from that time can be studied in the printed volumes. In 1967 this bibliography was developed into an electronic database, and in 1974 a Thesaurus of psychological Index Terms was published for the first time and subsequently used for indexing. The database has developed markedly during the years. Currently about 65.000 records are added annually. The database has been retrospectively updated back to 1887. Monographs and chapters from books are indexed, comprehensive citation indexing facilities have recently been developed and central parts of the database are also available as a full-text database (PsycARTICLES).

                      Until now ten editions of the PsycINFO thesaurus have been printed (Kinkade, 1974 & 1977; American Psychological Association, 1982, 1985, 1988 & 2001, Walker 1991, 1994, 1997 and Gallagher, 2004). In addition to the printed thesaurus are published an electronic thesaurus that allows online look up during database searching have been developed and is distributed with both CD-ROM and online versions of PsycINFO.

                      As the only other language there exist a German bilingual edition of Thesaurus of psychological Index Terms, which is used in the German PSYNDEX database. This is termed PSYNDEX Terms and is currently in its 7.th edition (Psyndex Terms, 2002) corresponding to the 9^th edition of the American thesaurus. This is an important step towards multilingual information retrieval in psychology. It is an obvious goal to try to expand this German initiative to other countries.

                      The 9^th.edition of the Thesaurus of psychological Index Terms was added to the source vocabularies of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) of the National Library of Medicine (cf. Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) UMLS Knowledge Sources & UMLS Fact sheet). This suggests that the thesaurus has an influence also on developments within medical information retrieval. According to Aslett; Aslett & Barr (2001, Vol. 26, p. 83) Thesaurus of psychological Index Terms was used—along with other social scientific thesauri—in the production of the index in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and behavioral Sciences.

                      All these facts suggest that Thesaurus of psychological Index Terms is not just one among other central tools in information retrieval in psychology but in many respects have a status the standard terminological tool for information retrieval. It is thus worth investigating this tool and try to develop principles and methods for its further improvement, which is the main goal of this paper.

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