Semiautomatic Determination of Citation Relevancy: User Evaluation

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1990

Department

Library and Information Science

Abstract

Online bibliographic, database searches typically produce hundreds of retrieved citations with only about 20–40% relevant to the search topic and/or problem statement. Significant amounts of time are required to categorize and select the relevant citations. A software system—SORT-AID/SABRE—has been developed which ranks the citations in terms of relevance. This paper presents the results of a comprehensive user evaluation of the relevance ranking procedures. Test results show that the software generated distributions approach the ideal distribution—all relevant citations at the beginning of the collection—in 22% of the cases, are 23% better than the random distribution—relevant citations distributed uniformly throughout the collection—on average and are poorer than the random distribution in 4% of the cases.

Publication Title

Information Processing and Management

Volume

26

Issue

2

First Page

295

Last Page

302

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