Method for storing bibliometric information on items from a finite source of text, and in particular document postings for use in a full-text document retrieval system

A method for storing document postings in a computer-based full-text document retrieval system, said method using a postulated relationship between a lexical term's occurrence frequency rank and its nominal weight, said postulated relationship depending exclusively on this rank and on the number of different lexical terms in a particular document as variables, said method comprising the steps of:

• a) for any lexical term in a particular document, computing its occurrence frequency and therefrom said lexical term's rank in an occurrence frequency ordering of the terms,
• b) storing a normalization factor as governed by said postulated relationship,
• c) assigning to each lexical term in the particular document a sequence number based on standard address mapping transform that is uniform among said documents and preserving said rank order,
• d) for each document, storing a sequence of postings each assigned to a unique lexical term in the document according to its assigned sequence number, each posting comprising:
• (i) an identifier for a next successive document comprising the same unique term,
• (ii) an offset value operating as pointer in said next successive document while indicating said unique term's posting sequence number in said next successive document as well as a direct indication of that unique term's weight in the document so identified.

A method for computer-accessing document postings in a computer-based full text retrieval system, said method comprising the steps of:

• a) entering for a document term a term identity representation,
• b) searching for an initial posting in a posting base table that has a document identifier and an offset,
• c) executing a program loop and while in each loop traversal, by means of a most recent document identifier and most recent offset, computing a next posting address, each posting so addressed containing a next document identifier and offset thereupon featuring as being most recent,
• d) and in each loop traversal also using its offset value found as a pointer and also as a weight representation number associated to said term in respect of its occurrence in the document associated to each respective loop traversal.