Semiautomatic determination of citation relevancy: A preliminary report

摘要

Technology transfer, research and development and engineering projects frequently require in-depth literature reviews. These reviews are carried out using computerized, bibliographic data bases. The review and/or searching process involves keywords selected from data base thesauri. The search strategy is formulated to provide both breadth and depth of coverage and yields both relevant and nonrelevant citations. Experience indicates that about 10–20% of the citations are relevant. As a consequence, significant amounts of time are required to eliminate the nonrelevant citations. This paper describes statistically based, lexical association methods which can be employed to determine citation relevance. In particular, the searcher selects relevant terms from citation-derived indexes and this information along with lexical statistics is used to determine citation relevance. Preliminary results are encouraging with the techniques providing an effective concentration of relevant citations.