Back of book indexes and the characteristics of author and nonauthor indexing: Report of an exploratory study

Abstract

This study examined the content of back of book indexes produced by 37 authors and 27 nonauthors. The purpose was to see if differences between the two groups of indexers could be discerned by counting the occurrence of characteristics in their indexes. The nonauthors, many or all of whom were probably professional indexers, provided significantly more index pages, modified headings, and modifiers than did the author indexers. The two groups were almost identical in their frequency of cross reference use. The simple counting technique is a feasible method. It should be applied to other populations of back of book indexes to determine how generalizable are the author/nonauthor differences seen here. © 1991 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.