MTI First Line Indexing (MTIFL) partially automates the standard indexing process at the US National Library of Medicine. MTIFL provides the initial indexing for a citation. A human indexer then reviews this indexing and modifies it as required by adding any missed terms, removing any incorrect terms, and supplying Publication Types. The process of the human curation of MTIFL results is called MTIFL Completion.
In 2010, the Indexing Initiative team and the NLM Index Section conducted a series of three experiments with MTI to determine the feasibility of using MTI recommended MHs as first-line indexing for selected subject areas. Journals for the three experiments were chosen from fields where MTI was performing well (for example, Microbiology, Anatomy, Botany, and Medical Informatics). The experiments measured the accuracy of MTI indexing and the amount of time required to index and revise both the manual and MTI First Line (MTIFL) Completion. The results of the experiments showed that MTIFL Completion was successful given the right circumstances, namely journals with a low potential for the need of manually created chemical flags and GeneRIFs that are normally added by the indexer. In the case of MTIFL, the burden of creating the chemical flags and GeneRIFs would shift to the reviser which would be time consuming and undesirable.
In February 2011, fourteen journals were included in a pilot evaluation of MTIFL Completion. Since that time, over 500 journals have been selected for indexing by MTIFL Completion, and new journals are added each month. The process of evaluating journals for indexing by MTIFL Completion is ongoing and dynamic, with journals added and removed based on continued refinement of the evaluation criteria and experience with MTIFL Completion results. One outcome of the MTIFL experiments was that the timing information showed it took indexers longer to remove wrong MTI recommendations than to add missing ones. In talking with the indexers, the reason for this extra time when removing a bad recommendation is that they have to take time and decide if they missed something in the article or not before removing it. So, MTIFL journals are processed with MTI's Balanced Recall/Precision Filtering option providing a smaller, more precise indexing list than with the regular MTI processing. The average F1 measure increases by 0.1378 (2018) when journals are incorporated into the MTIFL program. This increase is likely due to the extra filtering and indexing policies specific to MTIFL Completion.
MTI First Line Indexing (MTIFL) Update. As of August 17, 2021, we have discontinued the MTI First Line Indexing (MTIFL) list of journals. All of the previously MTIFL journals have now been moved to either MTI Review (MTIR) or are fully automatically being indexed in accordance with the NLM MEDLINE 2022 Project.
MTI Review (MTIR). MTIR is automatic indexing with human curation for critical elements. Journals may be switched to MTIR for several reasons, including lack of access to the full text and suitability of article titles and abstracts alone for representation of article content. MTIR provides the initial indexing for a citation. A human indexer then reviews this indexing and modifies it as required by adding any missed terms, removing any incorrect terms, and supplying Publication Types. Processing via MTIR started on February 7, 2019.
Current List of MTIR Journals (as of January 11, 2022): (6 kb)