To understand the discoursive function in scientific discourse management practices in bibliographic databases, we have focused on abstracts and keywords presented in SOCIOFILE - Sociological Abstracts. This American Database indexes and abstracts articles from around 2.000 international journals, dissertations, book reviews and conferences in Sociology and related fields. As we intended to present some analysis to explain the indexing practices related to urban violence we have studied just those words related to urban violence, in order to reveal the plurality of reading gestures and interpretations produced by the indexing tools.