Performing Informetric Analysis on Information Retrieval Test Collections: Preliminary Experiments in the Physics Domain
This work addresses the integration of informetric methods into information retrieval systems for physicists, but it is incremental as it presents preliminary experiments.
The paper tackled the problem of connecting informetric analysis with information retrieval by using the iSearch test collection from arXiv.org to evaluate if it serves as a suitable test bed for improving retrieval or recommendation systems with informetric methods, and found that the corpus includes important authors identified through bibliographic coupling and author-co-citation analysis for ten research questions.
The combination of informetric analysis and information retrieval allows a twofold application. (1) While in-formetrics analysis is primarily used to gain insights into a scientific domain, it can be used to build recommen-dation or alternative ranking services. They are usually based on methods like co-occurrence or citation analyses. (2) Information retrieval and its decades-long tradition of rigorous evaluation using standard document corpora, predefined topics and relevance judgements can be used as a test bed for informetric analyses. We show a preliminary experiment on how both domains can be connected using the iSearch test collection, a standard information retrieval test collection derived from the open access arXiv.org preprint server. In this paper the aim is to draw a conclusion about the appropriateness of iSearch as a test bed for the evaluation of a retrieval or recommendation system that applies informetric methods to improve retrieval results for the user. Based on an interview study with physicists, bibliographic coupling and author-co-citation analysis, important authors for ten different research questions are identified. The results show that the analysed corpus includes these authors and their corresponding documents. This study is a first step towards a combination of retrieval evaluations and the evaluation of informetric analyses methods.