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The more particular tagging becomes the more one has to assume that the one doing the tagging has been both consistent and meticulous, else any data gathering based on it will have holes where the creator was looking out of the window instead of paying attention.
It may be useful to build a bibliography from <cite> tags but if a few books have been given <i> tags then they will not appear. Better to build a bibliography by writing down the books and articles you refer to in your bibliography file as you refer to them. Typically academic articles referred to wouldn't be in italic anyway, rather in quote marks, depending on the style used.
I remember spending two months making an index to a complex book. I had to start over several times when I realised by page 50 or 100 that I should have been indexing something that I had ignored. While a human-built index will always be better than a machine-built one or a simple search, it will inevitably be idiosyncratic as the art of indexing is to make decisions on what to include on the basis of whether someone would ever want to look that up and how they would approach looking it up. But I can understand why so many books don't have a good index or none at all. It's hard work providing humanistic inroads into a book.
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