purpose: the thrust of this paper is to present a method for improving the accuracy of automatic indexing of chinese-english mixed documents.
design/methodology/approach: based on the inherent characteristics of chinese-english mixed texts and the cybernetics theory, we proposed an integrated control method for indexing  documents. it consists of "feed-forward control", "in-progress control" and "feed-back control", aiming at improving the accuracy of automatic indexing of chinese-english mixed documents. an experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of our proposed method.
findings: this method distinguishes chinese and english documents in grammatical structures and word formation rules. through the implementation of this method in the three phases of automatic indexing for the chinese-english mixed documents, the results were encouraging. the precision increased from 88.54% to 97.10% and recall improved from 97.37% to 99.47%.
research limitations: the indexing method is relatively complicated and the whole indexing process requires substantial human intervention. due to pattern matching based on a bruteforce (bf) approach, the indexing efficiency has been reduced to some extent.
practical implications: the research is of both theoretical signifi cance and practical value in improving the accuracy of automatic indexing of multilingual documents (not confined to chinese-english mixed documents). the proposed method will benefit not only the indexing of life science documents but also the indexing of documents in other subject areas.
originality/value: so far, few studies have been published about the method for increasing the accuracy of multilingual automatic indexing. this study will provide insights into the automatic indexing of multilingual documents, especially chinese-english mixed documents.

purpose: the thrust of this paper is to present a method for improving the accuracy of automatic indexing of chinese-english mixed documents.
design/methodology/approach: based on the inherent characteristics of chinese-english mixed texts and the cybernetics theory, we proposed an integrated control method for indexing  documents. it consists of "feed-forward control", "in-progress control" and "feed-back control", aiming at improving the accuracy of automatic indexing of chinese-english mixed documents. an experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of our proposed method.
findings: this method distinguishes chinese and english documents in grammatical structures and word formation rules. through the implementation of this method in the three phases of automatic indexing for the chinese-english mixed documents, the results were encouraging. the precision increased from 88.54% to 97.10% and recall improved from 97.37% to 99.47%.
research limitations: the indexing method is relatively complicated and the whole indexing process requires substantial human intervention. due to pattern matching based on a bruteforce (bf) approach, the indexing efficiency has been reduced to some extent.
practical implications: the research is of both theoretical signifi cance and practical value in improving the accuracy of automatic indexing of multilingual documents (not confined to chinese-english mixed documents). the proposed method will benefit not only the indexing of life science documents but also the indexing of documents in other subject areas.
originality/value: so far, few studies have been published about the method for increasing the accuracy of multilingual automatic indexing. this study will provide insights into the automatic indexing of multilingual documents, especially chinese-english mixed documents.