Some critical remarks on the stop word lists of ISI publications

Abstract

A semantic analysis of the “Weekly Subject Index Stop Word List” of Current Contents of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) as well as of the full‐stop word and semi‐stop word lists of the Permuterm Subject Index of Science Citation Index was carried out. Selected terms from the first issues for 1997, 1999 and 2000 of the CCODAb/Life Sciences, of the first issues for 1997 and 2000 of CCOD Proceedings, as well as from the SCI CDE for 1997 and January‐June of 2000 were screened. True full‐stop and semi‐stop words commonly occur in the dictionaries of these databases which proves that there is an abundance of meaningless terms in titles and abstracts. On the other hand, many synonyms and antonyms are absent in these lists. Proper list enlarging could contribute to more effective preparation of both printed reference publications and large databases thus ensuring a more economic information retrieval by practical users and scientometricians. The necessity of an improved, semantically oriented policy in preparing the lists of fullstop words and semi‐stop words used in modern databases worldwide is emphasised. Journal editors should encourage authors to reduce stop‐word usage in article titles and keyword sets.