Selection & Indexing Policies

The Petroleum Abstracts Division of The University of Tulsa makes every effort to obtain and review all important published literature and patents in the field of petroleum exploration, development and production, and to make such information promptly available to subscribers to Petroleum Abstracts and the accompanying services.

For this purpose, Petroleum Abstracts subscribes to several hundred technical journals and serial publications, and reviews new patents issued by major patenting countries. Preprints or proceedings of important technical meetings also are obtained for abstracting, as well as research reports from various government and other agencies (DOE, GTI, MMS, USGS, etc.).

Books are selected from reviews, announcements, and copies sent by publishers for review or approval. Selection is based on contribution to the field. For example, collections of papers, good reviews of areas or technologies, and reports of new technologies are included. Textbooks are excluded.

Patents are selected only when there is a clear application to petroleum exploration, development or production. Diagrams and company names are used in addition to the patent description to justify a selection.

Specialists in petroleum exploration and production review these publications and select those they consider to be of lasting interest for abstracting. In general, selections are restricted to new technology in the subject areas covered by Petroleum Abstracts, although occasional news items may be selected, if they report on significant technical developments or contain worthwhile data tabulations.

Every effort is made to provide coverage of new technology in areas of subscribers' interest and to broaden such coverage to include topics pertinent to current subscriber research, whenever possible. Recommendations for modified coverage are welcome at any time and will be given full consideration.

All documents considered for abstracting are evaluated based on their subject content. Original sources and complete articles are used rather than excerpts whenever possible.

Meeting papers are handled as follows:

• When complete text is available, full indexing is done.
• When only an abstract is available, the indexing is limited to one to twelve descriptors and the document type MEETING PAPER ABSTRACT. The abstract is ordinarily not published; however, abstracts are published for the annual meetings of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE), the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG), the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) International Meeting.
• Only meeting paper abstracts from recent or current meetings are selected, because their value is primarily for information on current activities. That is, if meeting paper abstracts are received several years after their publication, they will not be selected.
• The document type MEETING PAPER VISUAL was added in July 2003, with indexing limited to one to twelve descriptors.
• Meetings of peripheral interest are treated as a single citation for the entire meeting, with full indexing for the meeting.

When a paper or an article is published in more than one source, the second or subsequent publications are not given full indexing. These subsequent entries contain a primary descriptor only and a reference back to the original abstract and indexing. This policy also applied to patents published in more than one country until 1990. Since then, if the first source is an abstract only, or in a foreign language, a subsequent full text, English-language patent is given full indexing. When there is a choice of which source will be the "original" source, the following applies:

Exploration topics: Preference is given to USGS and State Geological Survey materials, society publications, and meeting papers over trade journals.
Production topics: Preference is given to the first appearance of the material.

Statistical compilations and survey articles that are confined to a specific subject area, such as drilling, are assigned to the appropriate category. Articles with broad coverage are assigned to the SCIENCE & ENGINEERING category.

Guidelines for each category topic.

Autoposting

Petroleum Abstracts follows the policy of assigning the most specific index terms available to the document in hand. All broader terms in the hierarchies for those terms are automatically assigned through computer processing as additional index terms.

Guidelines for the Creation of Geographic Terms

The ultimate authority for the location of geographic terms is the published material from which they are derived. In general, geographic locations that are used in professional refereed publications are accepted as terms for this Thesaurus. The following reference publications are used for verification and definition of geographic names:

Commercial Atlas & Marketing Guide. Annual publication, updated at regular intervals. Rand McNally.
1. Websters New Geographic Dictionary. Latest edition. G&C Merriam Co.
2. In addition, geographic names published as part of the Ocean Drilling Program and the Deep Sea Drilling Project by the National Science Foundation, Joint Oceanographic Institutions, Inc., usually are accepted as published.

Rules for the Creation of All Index Terms

1. A new index term must represent a distinctive concept not currently included in the Thesaurus.
2. Effort is made to retain commonly used word combinations.
        GAS CHROMATOGRAPHY
        IN SITU COMBUSTION
        THRUST FAULT
3. Nouns, and not adjectives, are used as terms, whenever possible.
        ELECTRICAL
        USE ELECTRICITY
4. Where synonyms exist, one is selected as the valid term and the others are referred to it.
        ELECTROMO TIVE FORCE
        USE ELECTRIC PO TENTIAL
        EAST TEXAS AREA
        USE EAST TEXAS BASIN
5. Effort is made to avoid inversion of word order. However, some inversions have been necessary. Where inversions exist, parentheses are used to indicate the inversion. The inverted term is then cross-referenced to the uninverted term.
        GENERATOR (ELECTRICAL)
        USE ELECTRIC GENERATOR
        WELL DRILLING
        USE DRILLING (WELL)
6. All terms are given in the singular form unless the meaning is changed by using the singular instead of the plural form: CUTTING is a process; CUTTINGS (ROCK) is a material.
7. Terms containing "of", such as "Gulf of _______" and "Straits of _______", are inverted to facilitate online retrieval whenever possible.
        MEXICO GULF
        FLORIDA STRAITS

Additional Descriptive Terms

Category, Document Type and Language terms are added to each document in Petroleum Abstracts and these terms can be used for searching the online Petroleum Abstracts files. Consult the online documentation for the correct way to search the specific fields where these terms are listed.

The category designates the section of the weekly bulletin where the document appeared. The MINERAL COMMODITIES category was used September 1977 through June 1995. The ECOLOGY & POLLUTION and SUPPLEMENTAL TECHNOLOGY categories were used until July 2006. The BUSINESS & ECONOMICS; HEALTH, SAFETY & ENVIRONMENT; and SCIENCE & ENGINEERING categories were added in July 2006.

• ALT FUELS & ENERGY SOURCES
• BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
• DRILLING (WELL)
• GEOCHEMISTRY
• GEOLOGY
• GEOPHYSICS
• HEALTH, SAFETY & ENVIRON
• PIPELINING, SHIP & STORAGE
• PRODUCING OIL & GAS
• RESERVOIR ENG & REC METHOD
• SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
• WELL COMPL SERV&WORKOVER
• WELL LOGGING & SURVEYING

Document types are assigned to indicate the type of document being indexed. PATENT has been used since 1965; MAP, THESIS, MEETING PAPER TEXT, MEETING PAPER ABSTRACT, GOVERNMENT REPORT and BOOK have been assigned since 1974. The document type REVIEW OR SURVEY was used from 1974 until mid-1987. Since then, the index term REVIEW has been used. The document type NEWS was used from 1974 until 2000. The document type STANDARD has been used since January 1997. The document type MEETING PAPER VISUAL was added in July 2003. OIL & GAS FIELDS FILE is a special document type, applied to the 1920-1964 documents pertaining to oil and gas fields.

PLEASE NOTE: If the document does not fit one of the document types, no aspect code is assigned to the document. This includes all of the journal articles and miscellaneous reports. When a document fits more than one document type, the type that is highest on the following list is used; the other type is indicated by an additional index term.

• PATENT
• MAP
• THESIS
• MEETING PAPER TEXT
• MEETING PAPER ABSTRACT
• MEETING PAPER VISUAL
• STANDARD
• GOVERNMENT REPORT
• BOOK
• OIL & GAS FIELDS FILE

Finally, the language in which the document is written is indicated.