Inter-Indexer Consistency
Inter-indexer consistency measures how far two or more people agree when they independently assign subject terms to the same documents. Because subject indexing is a judgment task — choosing which descriptors best represent a document's content — different indexers routinely pick overlapping but not identical term sets, and the degree of that overlap is a fundamental indicator of the reliability of an indexing system. The standard quantity is the Hooper-style consistency coefficient, the size of the shared term set divided by the size of the combined term set, averaged across documents; Zunde and Dexter and later Rolling refined it and connected it to indexing quality. Low consistency signals that retrieval will be unpredictable, since whether a document is found can depend on which indexer happened to process it.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Rolling, L. (1981). Indexing consistency, quality and efficiency. Information Processing & Management, 17(2), 69-76. · DOI 10.1016/0306-4573(81)90028-5
- Zunde, P., & Dexter, M. E. (1969). Indexing consistency and quality. American Documentation, 20(3), 259-267. · DOI 10.1002/asi.4630200313
- Manning, C. D., Raghavan, P., & Schütze, H. (2008). Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press. · ISBN 9780521865715
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.