PsycINFO thesaurus in ProQuest
We've had reports of some issues when searching the ProQuest databases via HDAS. These have been reported to ProQuest and investigated, with the following outcomes:
Reported issue: unexpected numbers of results when exploding terms in the PsycINFO thesaurus.
We've had some reports that exploding a thesaurus term brings back fewer results than just searching for the term - when we would expect exploding to bring back more results. One example is the term EATING DISORDERS.
Explanation from ProQuest: PsycINFO includes a classification field as well as a subject heading field, and some of the classification terms are the same as the subject headings (EATING DISORDERS is one example of a term that is used in both fields). When we send a request to search on a subject heading, ProQuest picks the term up from both the subject heading and classification fields (this is based on their own user research, in that users want to find any records that have been labelled with this term, regardless of what field the term is in). This means that for certain terms, there will be a larger number of records found, if the term is in both fields.
When we send a request to explode a subject heading, however, the request is treated differently. When exploding a term in the PsycINFO thesaurus, each heading is assigned a unique code; narrower (child) terms are also given the same code. So when the request to explode a term is sent, it is converted to the code number, and only returns results that include that code.
The classification field is not given this code, so any results that only have the term in the classification field are not included in the search.
This is why sometimes exploding a subject term brings back fewer results than just searching using the term.
Resolution: a request has been raised within ProQuest to investigate changing the way that thesaurus searching works so that classification terms are not included. We will update you when we know the outcome of this request.
Reported issue: irrelevant results from exploding some PsycINFO thesaurus terms
We've had a couple of reports that some terms (such as Alcohol intoxication) in the PsycINFO thesaurus are retrieving completely irrelevant results when they are exploded.
Response from ProQuest: this has been raised as high priority bug to be investigated and resolved.
Resolution: we will let you know when we've had confirmation from ProQuest that this has been resolved.
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