Representation and organization of knowledge in interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary domains have attracted little attention among specialists in Information Science. The lack of attention has affected the management of this kind of information in a negative way because models used for handling interdisciplinary information are based on or inspired by disciplinarity, causing problems in information retrieval. This study is part of broader research aiming to analyze an interdisciplinary domain, in this case Gender Studies, in order to identify its terminological behaviour and its conceptual dynamics for information retrieval. On the basis of a selected lexicon of 333 terms taken from a total of 5,200 terms coming from different sources, this study aims to bring to light the model followed in the representation of concepts related to the health, image and body of women, and their visualization in texts specialized in gender and in information retrieval systems, particularly in Gender thesauri. Secondary objectives are to determine if these sources suffer from gender bias and other types of prejudices of social constructions, here in regards to the body and the health of women, and to identify the research interest that these topics awaken, as reflected in the selected collection of specialized documents. To this end, a quantitative analysis of the selected terminology was done, comparing the results obtained with the selected lexicon from the indexing systems with the lexicon obtained from the primary sources, to detect coinciding terms and possible differences between the two, and so to appraise the documental warrant of the systems. Finally, the terms were grouped into categories in order to reveal the most relevant aspects for representation in the overall context of women's health, the female body and the image of women.
© 2007 by K. G. Saur Verlag
