‘Citation profiles’ to improve relevance in a two-stage retrieval system: A proposal

摘要

Individual differences in relevance judgements are not entirely erratic, and it is productive to consider citation profiles as a simple, convenient, and automatic method of reflecting the knowledge structure/past experience/viewpoints of the authors of papers. A citation profile is nothing but the list of citations appended to the paper. The list of references normally reflects a good sample of the complete or partial survey of that literature considered relevant by the author. Therefore, the source paper, together with its list of references, are to be kept together to provide a more complete picture of the ‘content’ and ‘structure’ of the document. The citation profile is believed to reflect the ‘state of knowing’ of the author, and higher commonality between the citation profile and the mental profile of a user would help improve a relevance decision. A mental profile is the state of knowing of the user, in terms of a set of documents known to the user as relevant. A step in the direction of designing and developing interactive, user-oriented, user-driven systems would be a two-stage information retrieval system where, in the first stage, a topical set of document representations would be produced by a Boolean search, and in the second stage, the citation profile of each document would be provided to the user, either in addition to or in lieu of abstracts.