Abstract

Citation indexes are valuable tools for research, in part because they provide a means with which to measure the relative impact of articles in a collection of scientific literature. Recent efforts demonstrate some value in retrieval systems for citation indexes based on measures of impact. However, such approaches use weak measures of relevance, ranking together a few useful documents with many that are frequently cited but irrelevant. We propose an indexing technique that joins measures of relevance and impact in a single retrieval metric. This approach, called Reference Directed Indexing (RDI) is based on a comparison of the terms authors use in reference to documents. Initial retrieval experiments with RDI indicate that it retrieves documents of a quality on par with current ranking metrics, but with significantly improved relevance.

Shannon Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Science in the Tippie College of Business here at Iowa. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University. His research interests focus on Information Retrieval, Human-Computer Interaction, and Knowledge Management, with particular emphasis on Web-based information technologies.