The information content of titles of Arabic periodical articles

Abstract

This paper provides a partial answer to the question of whether titles of Arabic periodical articles can be used for keyword indexing techniques. It examines the information content of titles of Arabic research papers in 16 scientific and non-scientific fields by counting the number of their substan tive words and comparing the results with those for English periodical articles in the same subject areas. Although signifi cant differences are found between the two samples in some subjects, such as agriculture, philosophy, linguistics, law, and library and information science, Arabic titles generally appear to be as informative as English titles. Some practical problems are found in using Arabic titles for indexing, e g the need to strip prefixes from keywords.