What should an index contain

A good index will: be arranged in alphabetical order include accurate page references that lead to useful information on a topic avoid listing every use of a word or phrase be consistent across similar topics use sub-categories to break up long blocks of page numbers use italics for publications and Acts cross-reference information to point to other headings of interest or preferred terms.

For example, a back-of-the-book index might read: sales, sales process, , , , see also strategy directs the reader to a related term scripts, 56—59 grouping term podcasts, 56—57 sub-term video, 58—59 search engine optimisation, , Security Analysis David Dodd and Benjamin Graham , 89—90 reference to a book spelling, see proofreading directs the reader to the word or phrase used in the text While software is available to help indexers arrange, format and edit entries, indexers will also use their judgement when deciding what to put into an index, what to leave out and how to organise it.

Read more: Cut the clutter in your annual report Facebook. Recent Articles Why create content? Revisiting the basics The first step in developing a content marketing program for ….

Nothing beats media coverage in amplifying your content marketing and …. A well-placed punctuation mark is the difference between 'let's eat …. Key Differences Between Table of Contents and Index Upcoming points will discuss the differences between table of contents and index: A table of contents is nothing but a systematic itemization of the chapters and sections, often accompanied by a page number, in which they exist.

Conversely, an index can be understood as the alphabetically arranged list of keywords names, places or topics with their associated page numbers. Table of Contents includes the title of the first level topics, listing the contents of the document on the basis of their title. Further, the arrangement in the table of contents is in chronological order, whereas in the case of an index, there is an alphabetical arrangement of the words, in the list, so as to ease navigation.

In Table of Contents, the chapters and section titles are arranged as per their page number. Conversely, in an index, the topics covered or keywords are given along with their page number. While the table of contents is found at the beginning of the book, an index is usually placed at the end of the book or document. The aim of the table of contents is to show the titles included in the document or paper at a quick glance. One significant difference between the two list pages is that while in a table of contents, you can find a reference to the additional pages along with the main content, such as foreword, preface, bibliography, annexure, appendix, so on and so forth.

However, in an index, you will never find a reference to such additional pages, as it covers keywords present in the main content. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Table of Contents implies an organized list containing the chapter-wise headings and sub-headings along with page numbers. If you decide it is necessary, see if you can include it as a subentry under a different entry.

For example, suppose you are indexing a dessert cookbook, and it has ice cream on two pages and sorbet on one page. You might consider putting these together under a larger heading, such as "frozen treats. Check your index for accuracy. Check every page you have listed in your index and make sure the entry can be found there. Adjust any page numbers as necessary to accurately reflect the content of your book. Proofread your entries.

Go line by line through your index and make sure all words are spelled correctly and all punctuation is correct and consistent. Even if you use spell check, it's still important to go through the index yourself, since some mistakes may slip past spell checkers. Set the final dimensions. The publisher will have page dimensions and margins to which your index should be set once all the proofreading and accuracy checking is complete.

This may be your responsibility, or the publisher may do it for you. Entries begin on the first space of the line, with the subsequent lines of the same entry indented. Did you know you can get expert answers for this article?

Unlock expert answers by supporting wikiHow. Christopher Taylor, PhD. Support wikiHow by unlocking this expert answer. Not Helpful 0 Helpful 0. Not Helpful 1 Helpful 0. Not Helpful 2 Helpful 8. Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered. If creating an index seems like too large of a task for you to complete on your own by the publisher's deadline, you may be able to hire a professional indexer to do the work for you.

Look for someone who has some knowledge and understanding about the subject matter of your work. Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0. Make the index as clear and simple as you can. Readers don't like looking through a messy, hard-to-read index. If you're using a word processing app that has an indexing function, avoid relying on it too much.

It will index all of the words in your text, which will be less than helpful to readers. By using this service, some information may be shared with YouTube. Related wikiHows How to. How to. More References About This Article. Co-authored by:. Co-authors: Updated: March 5, Article Summary X An index is an alphabetical list of keywords found in a book or other lengthy writing project. Italiano: Creare un Indice. Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read , times. More reader stories Hide reader stories.

Without a doubt, few technologies in SQL Server cause as much confusion and the spread of misinformation as indexes. This article looks at some of the most asked questions and a few that should be asked but often are not.

Once upon a time, the most common examples of where indexes are used were dictionaries and telephone books. The list begins like this:. It continues and has two pages as of this writing. A quick glance at the list tells you that the species are arranged alphabetically by their common name. Imagine though, that you are a biologist and are used to using the Latin names.

How would you find the entry for the Thunnus and Katsuwonus species? Now, imagine that this list holds all the known species in the world about 8. This reduction will also lead to secondary benefits, such as reduced CPU time, waits, cache use and more. To understand how this works, we need to first look at a table that has no indexes. SQL Server keeps all data in all its files for all databases in 8K pages. There are at least two files for every database: one for the data, which has the default file type.

Each table in the database has one or more pages. These are called heaps. A heap is pretty much like what its name implies: an unordered pile of stuff. That could be your dirty laundry, or leftover construction materials, or the mess left on the beach by a high tide or, as in this case, a bunch of pages for a table in SQL Server.

Nothing is organized in any way, except the IAM pages, which are chained together so SQL Server can find all the data pages for the table. Graphically it looks a bit like this:. All the data is there, but the only way to find anything is to read it starting at the beginning.

For a very large table, this will be terribly inefficient. The main thing SQL Server will do is a table scan. That means it will read all the rows of this table until it finds one with a customer id of Interestingly, if we hover over the big right-to-left arrow in the estimated plan, we see this:. There are logical reads — one for every page in the table. Also, there is an equal number of read-ahead reads.

These are physical reads that SQL Server does in anticipation of their being needed. So, how much of the table is that? This query tells us how many pages are used by this table:. SQL Server had to read all but one of the pages used in the table! Perhaps you thought that it would find the matching row about half-way through?

That would be the expected runtime, right? But since SQL Server is doing read ahead operations, to minimize the number of read operations, it winds up reading all the data pages. The other page contains metadata. If this table was part of a busy OLTP system and had millions of rows and thousands of simultaneous searches, this would put a nasty drag on system resources.

Even if you could hold the whole table in the buffer pool, that would make those buffers unavailable for other queries. Either way, this will make for a sickly server. Appropriate indexing is the cure! SQL Server supports indexing for a variety of needs. Full-text, Spatial and XML indexes are outside the scope of this article.

Although not mentioned above, we will also not be looking at columnstore indexes in this article, nor in-memory tables. As described above, a clustered index affects how the data is actually stored.

In a heap , the data rows are stored in no particular order. On the other hand, when you create a clustered index on a table, the organization of the data is changed so that it is now in order according to the keys specified. The result provides some guarantees regarding the asymptotic performance of the index.