Technical Reports Lists in the CIS Database
Technical Reports in the CIS Database
Ronald Thisted, 16 March 1995
Technical reports and preprints are, by their nature, ephemeral and of uneven quality. Systematic indexing of technical reports is probably not possible.
What may be a useful alternative, however, is to index technical reports that meet the following criteria:
- The report must not have been published in a journal as of a cutoff date specified each year, unless the published version is substantially abridged from the report, and the report contains important information not contained in the published version.
- The report must be continuously available to users of the CIS database for at least one year following issue of the CD-ROM.
- The report must be available at little or no charge (beyond a nominal fee to recover copying and shipping cost).
I propose that we have departments of statistics and related disciplines submit lists of technical reports to us in machine-readable form, in a format that we specify. These files submitted by departments would either be accepted (essentially as is) or rejected (if any editorial work would be required at all to put it into our common format).
Each year, departments would send us an entire updated list of all technical reports that they expect to have available during the coming year. It will be up to the departments to keep their lists up to date and accurate.
We would process the submitted data, merge the files from different departments, and index the entries, producing a data file and inverted indexes to them compatible in format with the existing CIS records. The technical report records would probably not be made available in the form submitted by the departments.
Our proposed format is for departments to create an ASCII file, which they could transmit to us either via electronic mail, ftp, or floppy disk, with each thesis encoded in a refer-like format with the following markup tags:
%H optional Header commentary
%A required Author's name
%T required Title of technical report
%R required(*) Name of report series, such as "Technical Report"
%N optional Technical report number, if any
%P optional Number of pages
%I required(*) Name of department and institution issuing the report
%C optional(*) City of publication
%D required(*) Date of publication (usually just the year)
%O optional(*) Other commentary (Is a longer version available elsewhere?)
%1 required(*) Availability URL
%2 optional English translation of title, if original not in English
%3 optional Math Reviews code numbers
%K optional Keywords, separated by semi-colons (in English)
%X optional Abstract or summary
Only relevant lines should be included; each field should appear exactly once per thesis except possibly for the %A lines, for which there should be one per author. Distinct reports should be preceded by an empty line. Any of the lines marked with an asterisk (*) above that would be the same for all entries in a file may be entered just once, at the beginning of the file, following a line with the contents %H Common Information
and followed by an empty line. The availability information is required, and will consist either of a valid URL (Universal Resource Locator), or one of the following extended URLs:
- <URL:mailto://valid e-mail address of person to whom a request for a copy should be sent>,
- <URL:buyat://name and address (or other locator) of organization from whom a copy of the report may be purchased>,
- <URL:post://valid postal address of person to whom a request should be sent>
Here are some sample entries:
%A Stein, Charles %T Estimation of the mean of a multivariate normal distribution %R Technical Report %N 48 %I Department of Statistics, Stanford University %C Stanford, California, USA %D 1973 %L English %1 <URL:mailto://secretary@playfair.stanford.edu/> %A McDonald, Gary C. %T Some properties of ridge coefficients %R Report %N GMR-1776 %I General Motors Research Laboratories %D 1975 %L English %1 <URL:postal://G C McDonald, General Motors Research Laboratory, 1234 Motor Lane, Detroit, Michigan/> %K Ridge trace; Mean-squared error; Optimal estimation %A de Leeuw, Jan %T Block-relaxation algorithms in statistics %R Technical Report %N 131 %I UCLA Statistics Series I %D 1993(?) %P 24 %L English %1 <URL:http://www.stat.ucla.edu/papers> %K Gauss-Seidel; Jacobi; Successive over-relaxationCapitalization would follow the ``lower-case titles'' rule. Key words should not duplicate those in the title. Authors' names should be in ``inverted order,'' that is family name first, followed by a comma, followed by other parts of the name. Despite the troff look to the format, mathematical symbols should use TeX notation.
In addition, each department submitting a file of technical reports must provide an ascii file, updated annually, with the name and contact information for a person to whom inquiries concerning the accuracy or completeness of information in that department's entries can be addressed. This information will be published on the CD-ROM as part of the documentation for technical report records.
Only departments, university divisions, or institutions may submit material to be included; entries submitted by individuals will be declined.
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