Evaluating the impact of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms on different types of searchers

作者：

Highlights：

• The usefulness of controlled vocabularies, exemplified by Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), was evaluated by a controlled user experiment.

• MeSH terms were most useful for domain experts in terms of precision measure.

• Domain knowledge was correlated with the precision score, whereas search training correlated with the recall score.

• This study demonstrated the feasibility of re-using a test collection originally created for evaluating the effectiveness of retrieval techniques for a controlled user experiment.

摘要

•The usefulness of controlled vocabularies, exemplified by Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), was evaluated by a controlled user experiment.•MeSH terms were most useful for domain experts in terms of precision measure.•Domain knowledge was correlated with the precision score, whereas search training correlated with the recall score.•This study demonstrated the feasibility of re-using a test collection originally created for evaluating the effectiveness of retrieval techniques for a controlled user experiment.

论文关键词：Information retrieval evaluation,Medical Subject Headings,Controlled vocabulary,Domain knowledge,User characteristics

论文评审过程：Received 3 October 2016, Revised 7 March 2017, Accepted 27 March 2017, Available online 3 April 2017, Version of Record 3 April 2017.

论文官网地址：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2017.03.004