Introduction to the PILOTS Thesaurus
The literature of traumatic stress is complex. It is produced by workers in many disciplines, including psychiatry, psychology, social work, criminology, and law. Some papers are reports of research; some are intended to help clinicians choose and apply therapeutic techniques; others are written to guide policy makers, to inform patients and their families, or to describe personal experiences. It is an international literature, with publications from dozens of countries and languages.
Because of all this, it is more difficult to search than less complicated literatures. Psychiatrists and psychologists don't always use the same words to describe the same phenomena. Europeans don't always use the same classification of mental disorders as Americans. Even so simple a concept as the proper term to describe Americans of African ancestry can be the subject of considerable controversy.
To alleviate these difficulties, PILOTS (like many other databases) uses a controlled vocabulary to standardize the indexing of documents and the process of retrieving them. The controlled vocabulary is not a concept limited to bibliographical work. Whether it be the definitions contained in the official rules of baseball or the nomenclature prescribed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a controlled vocabulary will come into being whenever there is a need to standardize the terminology used by a group of people working toward a common end. There are thousands of people around the world publishing work on traumatic stress. The most effective way of finding the papers you need in the PILOTS database is to use the PILOTS Thesaurus.
The PILOTS Thesaurus consists of a list of more than eleven hundred terms ("descriptors") arranged so as to show the relationships among them. When we index a document, we select from the Thesaurus the terms that best describe its form and content. When you search the PILOTS database, you can use the Thesaurus to find terms that best describe the material you are looking for. In theory -- and surprisingly often in practice -- when your search terms match our index terms you will have identified those papers most relevant to your need.
This list of terms is presented in two forms in the PILOTS Thesaurus: as a Systematic Table and as an Alphabetical Index.
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