Subject indexing in humanities : A comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service

Purpose – As the humanities develop in the realm of increasingly more pronounced digital scholarship, it isimportant to provide quality subject access to a vast range of heterogeneous information objects in digitalservices. The study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of affairs of the use of subjectindex terms in humanities journal articles with particular reference to the well-established subject access needsof humanities researchers, with the purpose of identifying which improvements are needed in this context. Design/methodology/approach – The comparison of subject metadata on a sample of 649 peer-reviewedjournal articles from across the humanities is conducted in a university repository, against Scopus, the formerreflecting local and national policies and the latter being the most comprehensive international abstract andcitation database of research output. Findings – The study shows that established bibliographic objectives to ensure subject access for humanitiesjournal articles are not supported in either the world’s largest commercial abstract and citation databaseScopus or the local repository of a public university in Sweden. The indexing policies in the two services do notseem to address the needs of humanities scholars for highly granular subject index terms with appropriatefacets; no controlled vocabularies for any humanities discipline are used whatsoever. Originality/value – In all, not much has changed since 1990s when indexing for the humanities was shown tolag behind the sciences. The community of researchers and information professionals, today working togetheron digital humanities projects, as well as interdisciplinary research teams, should demand that their subjectaccess needs be fulfilled, especially in commercial services like Scopus and discovery services